For these two affections
we have the philosophy and opinion of the heathens,
the flat affirmative of Plato, and not a negative from
Aristotle. There is another scruple cast in by divinity
concerning its production, much disputed in the German
auditories, and with that indifferency and equality of
arguments, as leave the controversy undetermined. I
am not of Paracelsus's mind, that boldly delivers a re-
ceipt to make a man without conjunction; yet cannot
but wonder at the multitude of heads that do deny
traduction, having no other arguments to confirm their
belief than that rhetorical sentence and
antimetathesis<51>
of Augustine,
"creando infunditur, infundendo creatur."Either opinion will consist well enough with religion:
yet I should rather incline to this, did not one objection
haunt me, not wrung from speculations and subtleties,
but from common sense and observation; not pick'd
from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the
weeds and tares of my own brain. And this is a con-
clusion from the equivocal and monstrous productions
in the copulation of a man with a beast: for if the soul
of man be not transmitted and transfused in the seed of
the parents, why are not those productions merely
beasts, but have also an impression and tincture of
reason in as high a measure, as it can evidence itself in
those improper organs? Nor, truly, can I peremptorily
deny that the soul, in this her sublunary estate, is
wholly, and in all acceptions, inorganical: but that,
for the performance of her ordinary actions, is required
not only a symmetry and proper disposition of organs,
but a crasis and temper correspondent to its operations;
yet is not this mass of flesh and visible structure the
instrument and proper corpse of the soul, but rather of
sense, and that the hand of reason.
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