What is the origin of the phrase "to lick into shape"?

The phrase "to lick someone or something into shape" means to act decisively or forcefully to bring someone or something into a fitter, more efficient or better-organised state.

This expression originated in the belief that bear cubs are born as formless lumps and need to be licked into their proper shape by their mothers. In his “Naturalis Historia” (“Natural History”), the Roman statesman and scholar Pliny the Elder wrote about newborn bears: “These are shapeless white flesh, a little bigger than mice, with no eyes or hair; their claws alone prominent. The mothers lick them gradually into shape.”

The first mention of this belief in English is in the 15th-century “Pylgremage of the Sowle” in which an angel explains that, just like newborn bears who need to be licked into shape by their father and mother, humans are born imperfect, deformed by the original sin, and need to be shaped by the tongue of doctrine and of teaching.

In “The Third Book of Pantagruel” (1546) François Rabelais wrote that “a bear at his first coming into the world has neither hands, skin, hair, nor head, but is merely an inform, rude, and ill-favoured piece and lump of flesh, and would remain still so, if his mother, out of the abundance of her affection to her hopeful cub, did not with much licking put his members into that figure and shape which nature had provided.”