Page - 1428 - in The Complete Aristotle

different animals. Round these is a skin-like integument, because the weakness of the vessels needs protection and shelter. The vessels join on to the uterus like the roots of plants, and through them the embryo receives its nourishment. This is why the animal remains in the uterus, not, as Democritus says, that the parts of the embryo may be moulded in conformity with those of the mother. This is plain in the ovipara, for they have their parts differentiated in the egg after separation from the matrix. Here a difficulty may be raised. If the blood is the nourishment, and if the heart, which first comes into being, already contains blood, and the nourishment comes from outside, whence did the first nourishment enter? Perhaps it is not true that all of it comes from outside just as in the seeds of plants there is something of this nature, the substance which at first appears milky, so also in the material of the animal embryo the superfluous matter of which it is formed is its nourishment from the first. The embryo, then, grows by means of the umbilicus in the same way as a plant by its roots, or as animals themselves when separated from the nutriment within the mother, of which we must speak later at the time appropriate for discussing them. But the parts are not differentiated, as some suppose, because like is naturally carried to like. Besides many other difficulties involved in this theory, it results from it that the homogeneous parts ought to come into being each one separate from the rest, as bones and sinews by themselves, and flesh by itself, if one should accept this cause. The real cause why each of them comes into being is that the secretion of the female is potentially such as the animal is naturally, and all the parts are potentially present in it, but none actually. It is also because when the active and the passive come in contact with each other in that way in which the one is active and the other passive (I mean in the right manner, in the right place, and at the right time), straightway the one acts and the other is acted upon. The female, then, provides matter, the male the principle of motion. And as the products of art are made by means of the tools of the artist, or to put it more truly by means of their movement, and this is the activity of the art, and the art is the form of what is made in something else, so is it with the power of the nutritive soul. As later on in the case of mature animals and plants this soul causes growth from the nutriment, using heat and cold as its tools (for in these is the movement of the soul), and each thing comes into being in accordance with a certain formula, so also from the beginning does it form the product of nature. For the material by which this latter grows is the same as that from which it is constituted at first; consequently also the power which acts upon it is identical with that which originally generated it; if then this acting power is the nutritive soul, this is also the generative soul, and this is the nature of every organism, existing in all animals and plants. [But the other 1428