V GENERAL REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 295 



contain the source of motion, and it is further the final and the 

 formal cause. These several causes are not, however, all con- 

 tributed by both parents. The teaching of Aristotle is that the 

 matter is provided by the female, and the female alone. 1 The 

 egg (or catamenia) is described as being matter (vAr/), body (o-wjua), 

 potentiality (bvvap.is), passive (nadriTiKov), and merely quantitative, 

 although it is true that a sort of soul, the nutritive, is somewhat 

 grudgingly conceded to it, since unfertilized eggs appear in 

 some sense to be alive. 2 The male element, on the other hand, 

 provides the principle of motion (ap\r] T *) s Ktz^o-ecos) and the 

 form (eiSos); it is qualitative, it is activity, it produces the 

 perceptive soul, if it is not itself that soul, and it is responsible 

 for the ' correct proportionality ' (Ao'yos) of the organization. 3 



The male element contributes only motion ; it acts upon the 

 female element as rennet acts when it coagulates milk, except 

 that the analogy is incomplete, since the yovrj brings about 

 a qualitative, and not merely a quantitative, change in the 

 material on which it operates. 4 To this it imparts the same 

 kind of motion which itself possesses, the motion which was 

 present in the particles of the food in its final form from which 

 it was itself derived. 5 



The communication of this motion is enough to set going the 

 machinery (avTop.aTov) ; the rest then follows of itself in proper 

 order. 6 To impart this necessary motion is the function of the 

 nutritive soul, which is primarily associated with the male, only 

 somewhat doubtfully with the female, element ; the perceptive 

 soul which is, and therefore presumably also imparts, motion of 

 a kind (dAAoicoo-ts) is found in the former alone. 7 As to the third 

 kind of soul, mind, Aristotle says little, but it is not introduced 

 in the male element : it is separable and comes in from outside. 



Lastly, the sperm of the male acts like a cunning workman 

 who makes a work of art, using heat and cold as its implements 

 as the workman uses his tools ; 8 for this heat and this cold could 

 never of themselves by coagulations and condensations produce 

 the form of the body, as the older naturalists had supposed, 



1 De Gen. I. 20, 21 ; II. 1, 4. 2 Ibid. II. 5. 3 Ibid. I. 20, 21 ; II. 

 1, 4. 4 Ibid. I. 20 ; IV. 4. 6 Ibid. II. 3. 6 Ibid. II. 1, 5. 



7 Ibid. II. 3 ; De An. II. 5. 8 De Gen. II. 4. 



