Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/468

 of love to secure the perpetuity of their kinds. Or (and it is thus that we have it in the mythology) it is as if the genital organs of Saturn, cast into the sea at this season, raised a foam, whence sprung Aphrodite. For, in the generation of animals, as the poet says, " superat tener omnibus humor/' a gentle moisture all pervades, and the genitals froth and are replete with semen.

The cock and the hen are especially fertile in the spring ; as if the sun, or heaven, or nature, or the soul of the world, or the omnipotent God for all these names signify the same thing were a cause in generation superior and more divine than they ; and thus it is that the sun and man, i.e. the sun through man as the instrument, engender man. In the same way the pre- server of all things, and the male among birds, give birth to the egg, from whence the chick, the perfect bird, is made eternal in its kind by the approach and recession of the god of day, who, by the divine will and pleasure, or by fate, serves for the generation of all that lives.

Let us conclude, therefore, that the male, although a prior and more excellent efficient than the female, is still no more than an instrumental efficient, and that he, not less than the female, must refer his fecundity or faculty of engendering as received from the approaching sun; and, consequently, that the skill and foresight, which are apparent in his work, are not to be held as proceeding from him but from God ; inas- much as the male in the act of kind neither uses counsel nor understanding; neither does man engender the rational part of his soul, but only the vegetative faculty ; which is not re- garded as any principal or more divine faculty of the soul, but one only of a lower order.

Since, then, there is not less of skill and prescience mani- fested in the structure of the chick than in the creation of man and the universe at large, it is imperative even in the genera- tion of man to admit an efficient cause, superior to, and more excellent than man himself : otherwise the vegetative faculty, or that part of the soul or living principle which fashions and preserves a man, would have to be accounted far more excellent and divine, and held to bear a closer resemblance to God than the rational portion of the soul, whose excellence, nevertheless, we extol over all the faculties of all animals, and esteem as