time: the refreshing river 



two sexes. We realise to-day that to ask which is the more perfect 

 of the two sexes is a meaningless question, for we have expelled ethics 

 from science and cannot regard any one thing as being more perfect 

 than any other. Again, describing the course of the arteries in the 

 developing chick, Albertus says: "One of tlie two passages which 

 springs from the heart branches into two, one of them going to the 

 spiritual part which contains the heart, and carrying to it the pulse 

 and subtle food from which the lungs and other spiritual parts are 

 formed; and the other passing through the diaphragm to enclose the 

 yolk of the egg, around which it forms the liver and stomach." This 

 distinction between the organs above the diaphragm — the lungs, 

 heart, thymus, etc. — called "spiritualia," and the organs below — 

 the stomach, liver, intestines, spleen, etc. — runs through the whole of 

 the early anatomy. It was as if the organs of the thorax were regarded 

 as a respectable family living at the top of an otherwise disreputable 

 block of flats. To us it seems absurd to call one organ more "spiritual" 

 than another, but that is because we realise the irrelevance of ethical 

 issues in biology. Thomas Aquinas, about the same time, in his 

 Summa Theologica, dealt in passing with human generation. "The 

 generative power of the female," he said, "is imperfect compared to 

 that of male, for just as in the crafts, the inferior workman prepares 

 the material and the more skilled operator shapes it, so likewise the 

 female generative virtue provides the substance but the active male 

 virtue makes it into the finished product." This is really the pure 

 Aristotelian doctrine, but St. Thomas gives it the characteristically 

 mediaeval twist. Aristotle might make a distinction between form and 

 matter in generation, but the feudal mentality, with its perpetual 

 hankering after status, would at once enquire which of the two, male 

 or female, was the higher, tlie nobler, the more honourable. 



In the eighteenth century tlie same frame of mind persisted. It was 

 maintained that in every detail of the visible world some evidence 

 could be found for the central dogma of natural theology, the belief 

 in a just and beneficent God.^ Between 1700 and 1850 a multitude 

 of books were written which purported to reveal the wisdom and 

 goodness of God in the natural creation. The theologians took what 

 suited their purpose and left the rest. It is instructive to see how 

 Goethe, who was somewhat committed to the theological inter- 

 pretation of phenomena, reacted to the ornithological anecdotes of 



^ For a striking example of this, see Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (London, 1907, 

 and many later editions). 



