MOYERS: Do you think the poet Wordsworth was right when he wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting,/And cometh from afar”? Do you think that is so? CAMPBELL: I do. Not in entire forgetfulness—that is to say, the nerves in our body carry the memories that shaped the organization of our nervous system to certain environmental circumstances and to the demands of an organism.
