Page:Duns Scotus, defender of the Immaculate Conception (1955).djvu/26

 due original justice that should be there, because received by our first parent and culpably lost by him. $24$

Original sin involved another problem for the scholastics. Owing to their mediate animation views, the school men placed an interval of time between active and passive generation, that is, between the natural generative act of the parents and the actual coming into being of the new human person at the moment God infuses the rational soul. St. Thomas $25$ mentions forty days in the case of a male child, and eighty days in the case of the female child. He also postulates a succession of vital principles in man. When the formative power of the paternal semen has sufficiently disposed the materials provided by the mother, a vegetative soul is generated in this fundamentally organized matter. After further perfection of organization the vegetative soul is replaced by a sentient soul. Ultimately, when progressive organization has produced a sufficient human pattern, God infuses the spiritual soul, which takes over the functions of the preceding vegetative and sentient vital principles.

According to Scotus, all immanent life in the human embyro from the very beginning derives from the rational soul infused by God. $26$ But we must not interpret this statement in terms of present-day notions of biology, which teaches that the embryonic life and development of the new human individual begins with the fertilized ovum, that is, with the moment of the fusion of two living organic cells derived from the living substance of both parents. It is, therefore, a vital process throughout. The medieval view, shared by Scotus in common with all the schoolmen, was that the seminal fluid had no life. The 10