104 EMBRYOLOGY FROM GALEN [pt. ii 



is imperfect compared to that of the 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". How admirably this expresses the dominating sentiment 

 of the Middle Ages! Aristotle might make a distinction between 

 matter and form in generation, but the mediaeval mind, with its 

 perpetual hankering after value, would at once enquire which of the 

 two was the higher, the nobler, the more honourable. 



St Thomas' theory of embryonic animation was complicated. He 

 had a notion that the foetus was first endowed with a vegetative 

 soul, which in due course perished, at which moment the embryo 

 came into the possession of a sensitive soul, which died in its turn, 

 only to be replaced by a rational soul provided directly by God, 

 This led him into great difficulties, for, if this scheme were true, it 

 was difficult to say that man generated man at all; on the contrary 

 he could hardly be said to generate more than a sensitive soul which 

 died before birth, and, on this view, what was to happen to original 

 sin? As Harris has put it, Plato had said that the intellect was the 

 man, using the body as a boatman uses a boat. Averroes had said 

 precisely the opposite, namely, that the essence of humanity was in 

 the body, and that the intellect was something extrinsic, not limited 

 to the individual, but common to the race. Aristotle had taken the 

 middle position, and given a soul to plants and animals, but, in 

 doing so, he had made it into a vital rather than a psychological 

 principle. The task of combining this -^vxv with the anima of the 

 Fathers was what scholastic philosophy had before it. No wonder 

 that St Thomas' account of embryonic animation was open to 

 criticism. An echo of it appears in a poem of Jalalu'd-Din Rumi 

 ( 1 207-1 273), the greatest of the Persian Sufi poets, and an exact 

 contemporary of St Thomas Aquinas : 



I died from mineral and plant became: 

 Died from the plant, and took a sentient frame; 

 Died from the beast, and donned a human dress; 

 When by my dying did I e'er grow less? 



Duns Scotus (i 266-1 308) objected to St Thomas' theory on the 

 grounds already mentioned, and he himself abandoned the vegetative 

 and sensitive souls altogether in his De Rerum Principio. This solution 



