第35章

Now it is true that the faculty of all kinds of soul seems to have a connexion with a matter different from and more divine than the so-called elements; but as one soul differs from another in honour and dishonour, so differs also the nature of the corresponding matter.All have in their semen that which causes it to be productive; I mean what is called vital heat.This is not fire nor any such force, but it is the spiritus included in the semen and the foam-like, and the natural principle in the spiritus, being analogous to the element of the stars.Hence, whereas fire generates no animal and we do not find any living thing forming in either solids or liquids under the influence of fire, the heat of the sun and that of animals does generate them.Not only is this true of the heat that works through the semen, but whatever other residuum of the animal nature there may be, this also has still a vital principle in it.From such considerations it is clear that the heat in animals neither is fire nor derives its origin from fire.

Let us return to the material of the semen, in and with which comes away from the male the spiritus conveying the principle of soul.

Of this principle there are two kinds; the one is not connected with matter, and belongs to those animals in which is included something divine (to wit, what is called the reason), while the other is inseparable from matter.This material of the semen dissolves and evaporates because it has a liquid and watery nature.Therefore we ought not to expect it always to come out again from the female or to form any part of the embryo that has taken shape from it; the case resembles that of the fig-juice which curdles milk, for this too changes without becoming any part of the curdling masses.

It has been settled, then, in what sense the embryo and the semen have soul, and in what sense they have not; they have it potentially but not actually.

Now semen is a secretion and is moved with the same movement as that in virtue of which the body increases (this increase being due to subdivision of the nutriment in its last stage).When it has entered the uterus it puts into form the corresponding secretion of the female and moves it with the same movement wherewith it is moved itself.For the female's contribution also is a secretion, and has all the arts in it potentially though none of them actually; it has in it potentially even those parts which differentiate the female from the male, for just as the young of mutilated parents are sometimes born mutilated and sometimes not, so also the young born of a female are sometimes female and sometimes male instead.For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure;for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.For this reason, whenever a wind-egg is produced by any animal, the egg so forming has in it the parts of both sexes potentially, but has not the principle in question, so that it does not develop into a living creature, for this is introduced by the semen of the male.When such a principle has ben imparted to the secretion of the female it becomes an embryo.

Liquid but corporeal substances become surrounded by some kind of covering on heating, like the solid scum which forms on boiled foods when cooling.All bodies are held together by the glutinous; this quality, as the embryo develops and increases in size, is acquired by the sinewy substance, which holds together the parts of animals, being actual sinew in some and its analogue in others.To the same class belong also skin, blood-vessels, membranes, and the like, for these differ in being more or less glutinous and generally in excess and deficiency.