Page - 1396 - in The Complete Aristotle

combine so as to become one animal again. Yet those who say that semen comes from the whole of the body really have to talk in that way, and as it happened then in the earth during the ‘Reign of Love’, so it happens according to them in the body. Now it is impossible that the parts should be united together when they come into being and should come from different parts of the parent, meeting together in one place. Then how can the upper and lower, right and left, front and back parts have been ‘sundered’? All these points are unintelligible. Further, some parts are distinguished by possessing a faculty, others by being in certain states or conditions; the heterogeneous, as tongue and hand, by the faculty of doing something, the homogeneous by hardness and softness and the other similar states. Blood, then, will not be blood, nor flesh flesh, in any and every state. It is clear, then, that that which comes from any part, as blood from blood or flesh from flesh, will not be identical with that part. But if it is something different from which the blood of the offspring comes, the coming of the semen from all the parts will not be the cause of the resemblance, as is held by the supporters of this theory. For if blood is formed from something which is not blood, it is enough that the semen come from one part only, for why should not all the other parts of the offspring as well as blood be formed from one part of the parent? Indeed, this theory seems to be the same as that of Anaxagoras, that none of the homogeneous parts come into being, except that these theorists assume, in the case of the generation of animals, what he assumed of the universe. Then, again, how will these parts that came from all the body of the parent be increased or grow? It is true that Anaxagoras plausibly says that particles of flesh out of the food are added to the flesh. But if we do not say this (while saying that semen comes from all parts of the body), how will the foetus become greater by the addition of something else if that which is added remain unchanged? But if that which is added can change, then why not say that the semen from the very first is of such a kind that blood and flesh can be made out of it, instead of saying that it itself is blood and flesh? Nor is there any other alternative, for surely we cannot say that it is increased later by a process of mixing, as wine when water is poured into it. For in that case each element of the mixture would be itself at first while still unmixed, but the fact rather is that flesh and bone and each of the other parts is such later. And to say that some part of the semen is sinew and bone is quite above us, as the saying is. Besides all this there is a difficulty if the sex is determined in conception (as Empedocles says: ‘it is shed in clean vessels; some wax female, if they fall in with cold’). Anyhow, it is plain that both men and women change not only from infertile to fertile, but also from bearing female to bearing male offspring, which looks as if the cause does not lie in the semen coming from 1396