He is not the product of matter, but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he clothes himself are of his own making.

For the intelligence and will of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in every act of thought.

Thus he is ever creating round him thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies, forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker has long gone back to earth and air and water.

When the time for rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms, its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body, and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations.

So does each man create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative energies in his past.