Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/294

 matter has no power of itself to rise up and to form into a tree. The material tree is simply a body taken on to clothe the plant-soul, which is a form made of spiritual substances through the vital forces in the spiritual world derived from the Creator.

Upon this basis, that difference between plants whereby an acorn produces an oak and a beechnut a beech, or the leaves of one plant are rotund, and of another are linear, is readily accounted for. The acorn from the beginning has been the avenue and reservoir of oak-tree life. The genus, character, and life of the oak have from the beginning flowed through the tree into the seed, and have made it a vessel and form of oak character. The oak has put its whole self into the seed, and made it an initial oak form, but nothing else. When the acorn is planted, only what is within can unfold. It is essentially a form receptive of such qualities as the oak has, and it brings forth according to its form and kind.

So of every seed. There are infinite potencies in the activities of the spiritual world, and each kind of seed is a specific form receptive of its individual potency. External agencies can not change the essential potency of a seed or plant, though varying conditions may, within limitations, affect the manifestation of it, as in the