第18章

On examining the question, however, the opposite appears more likely, for it is not hard to refute the above arguments and the view involves impossibilities.First, then, the resemblance of children to parents is no proof that the semen comes from the whole body, because the resemblance is found also in voice, nails, hair, and way of moving, from which nothing comes.And men generate before they yet have certain characters, such as a beard or grey hair.

Further, children are like their more remote ancestors from whom nothing has come, for the resemblances recur at an interval of many generations, as in the case of the woman in Elis who had intercourse with the Aethiop; her daughter was not an Aethiop but the son of that daughter was.The same thing applies also to plants, for it is clear that if this theory were true the seed would come from all parts of plants also; but often a plant does not possess one part, and another part may be removed, and a third grows afterwards.Besides, the seed does not come from the pericarp, and yet this also comes into being with the same form as in the parent plant.

We may also ask whether the semen comes from each of the homogeneous parts only, such as flesh and bone and sinew, or also from the heterogeneous, such as face and hands.For if from the former only, we object that resemblance exists rather in the heterogeneous parts, such as face and hands and feet; if then it is not because of the semen coming from all parts that children resemble their parents in these, what is there to stop the homogeneous parts also from being like for some other reason than this? If the semen comes from the heterogeneous alone, then it does not come from all parts; but it is more fitting that it should come from the homogeneous parts, for they are prior to the heterogeneous which are composed of them; and as children are born like their parents in face and hands, so they are, necessarily, in flesh and nails.If the semen comes from both, what would be the manner of generation? For the heteroeneous parts are composed of the homogneous, so that to come from the former would be to come from the latter and from their composition.To make this clearer by an illustration, take a written name; if anything came from the whole of it, it would be from each of the syllables, and if from these, from the letters and their composition.So that if really flesh and bones are composed of fire and the like elements, the semen would come rather from the elements than anything else, for how can it come from their composition? Yet without this composition there would be no resemblance.If again something creates this composition later, it would be this that would be the cause of the resemblance, not the coming of the semen from every part of the body.

Further, if the parts of the future animal are separated in the semen, how do they live? and if they are connected, they would form a small animal.

And what about the generative parts? For that which comes from the male is not similar to what comes from the female.

Again, if the semen comes from all parts of both parents alike, the result is two animals, for the offspring will have all the parts of both.Wherefore Empedocles seems to say what agrees pretty well with this view (if we are to adopt it), to a certain extent at any rate, but to be wrong if we think otherwise.What he says agrees with it when he declares that there is a sort of tally in the male and female, and that the whole offspring does not come from either, 'but sundered is the fashion of limbs, some in man's...' For why does not the female generate from herself if the semen comes from all parts alike and she has a receptacle ready in the uterus? But, it seems, either it does not come from all the parts, or if it does it is in the way Empedocles says, not the same parts coming from each parent, which is why they need intercourse with each other.

Yet this also is impossible, just as much as it is impossible for the parts when full grown to survive and have life in them when torn apart, as Empedocles accounts for the creation of animals; in the time of his 'Reign of Love', says he, 'many heads sprang up without necks,'

and later on these isolated parts combined into animals.Now that this is impossible is plain, for neither would the separate parts be able to survive without having any soul or life in them, nor if they were living things, so to say, could several of them 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.