Page - 1398 - in The Complete Aristotle

As to the vehemence of pleasure in sexual intercourse, it is not because the semen comes from all the body, but because there is a strong friction (wherefore if this intercourse is often repeated the pleasure is diminished in the persons concerned). Moreover, the pleasure is at the end of the act, but it ought, on the theory, to be in each of the parts, and not at the same time, but sooner in some and later in others. If mutilated young are born of mutilated parents, it is for the same reason as that for which they are like them. And the young of mutilated parents are not always mutilated, just as they are not always like their parents; the cause of this must be inquired into later, for this problem is the same as that. Again, if the female does not produce semen, it is reasonable to suppose it does not come from all the body of the male either. Conversely, if it does not come from all the male it is not unreasonable to suppose that it does not come from the female, but that the female is cause of the generation in some other way. Into this we must next inquire, since it is plain that the semen is not secreted from all the parts. In this investigation and those which follow from it, the first thing to do is to understand what semen is, for then it will be easier to inquire into its operations and the phenomena connected with it. Now the object of semen is to be of such a nature that from it as their origin come into being those things which are naturally formed, not because there is any agent which makes them from it as simply because this is the semen. Now we speak of one thing coming from another in many senses; it is one thing when we say that night comes from day or a man becomes man from boy, meaning that A follows B; it is another if we say that a statue is made from bronze and a bed from wood, and so on in all the other cases where we say that the thing made is made from a material, meaning that the whole is formed from something preexisting which is only put into shape. In a third sense a man becomes unmusical from being musical, sick from being well, and generally in this sense contraries arise from contraries. Fourthly, as in the ‘climax’ of Epicharmus; thus from slander comes railing and from this fighting, and all these are from something in the sense that it is the efficient cause. In this last class sometimes the efficient cause is in the things themselves, as in the last mentioned (for the slander is a part of the whole trouble), and sometimes external, as the art is external to the work of art or the torch to the burning house. Now the offspring comes from the semen, and it is plainly in one of the two following senses that it does so—either the semen is the material from which it is made, or it is the first efficient cause. For assuredly it is not in the sense of A being after B, as the voyage comes from, i.e. after, the Panathenaea; nor yet as contraries come from contraries, for then one of the 1398