He goes on: "The determinants differ among themselves; those of a muscle are differently constituted from those of a nerve-cell or a glandular cell, etc., and each determinant is in its turn made up of minute vital units, which I call biophors, or the bearers of life."
That these so-called determinants differ among themselves may be true, if they exist at all, which is just the point to be proved. Giving Greek names to inventions does not turn invention into fact. These supposed determinants, he says, "may vary quantitatively if the elements of which they are composed vary; they ... and their variations may give rise to corresponding variations of the organ, cell, or cell-group which they determine." Professor Dwight said:[38] "This is what is palmed off on us for science!" Weismann assures us we must admit this farrago of clumsy fiction, otherwise we should be forced "to assume the help of a principle of design."[39] In the name of common sense, then, admit a principle of design, and be done with it!
Darwin's Gemmule Theory is the same guessing; and Weismann rejects it because he did not think of it first. As a theory the gemmule plot is just as good and just as bad scientifically as Weismann's. The chief objection to such imagining is that after its authors have put it into print a few times they lose all sense of humor, and mistake phantasms for facts.
Up to the present time we have discovered no living organism lower in grade than the cell. If life ever originated from inorganic matter, it appeared in an organized cell. The Weismann ids, biophors, and the rest, supposing they existed outside his own imagination, are not more capable of independent life than is a chromatin granule. In any event, these biophors could not have originated spontaneously in the first living being; and if they could not so have come into existence, life could never have begun. However primitive any organism is, it must be able to nourish itself and to develop into a higher specific form; but such a variety of functions supposes differentiated structure, composed of unstable chemical substances, a correlation of parts, a purposeful anticipation of ends. Inorganic substances, crystals, and the like are characteristically stable, not unstable; and these could not have been brought into the organic state on an earth burnt to a cinder and devoid of chlorophyl, which itself presupposes organic cells. Whence came also the absolutely essential form of energy, directive of vegetative life? The only possible explanation is that life was created, not evolved by a stranger miracle from a lump of lava.
We know the successive steps in the growth of the embryo from the time of fertilization to the end of gestation, but how this vital process is effected is not so evident. What we are certain of is that there is a vital principle of some kind from the beginning, and this is the matter of real importance in the present discussion. The old moralists held that this principle in the human being is at first vegetative; after a while that vegetative vital principle is expelled by a sensitive principle; and finally this sensitive soul is expelled by the rational vital principle, or human soul. St. Thomas[40] says: "Some tell us the vital acts that appear in the embyro are not from its soul, but from the soul of the mother, or from the primitive force in the semen. Both these statements are false. Vital operations, as sensation, nutrition, growth, cannot come from an extrinsic principle; therefore it must be admitted that a soul preëxisted in the embryo, nutritive at first, then sensitive, and finally intellectual." After showing that an intellectual soul cannot be evolved from lower forms, he concludes: "Therefore we say that since the generation of one thing is always the corruption of another, in man as in other animals, when a more perfect form comes in this supposes the corruption of any precedent form; so, however, that the sequent form has all perfection that was in the destroyed forms, and something in addition: and thus through many generations and corruptions the final substantial form is attained in man and other animals. This is apparent to the senses in animals generated from putrefaction. Therefore the intellectual soul is created by God at the end of human generation, and this soul is both sensitive and nutritive, all precedent forms having been destroyed."
There is no such thing as the generation of any animal or other living being from putrefaction; but that is irrelevant. St. Thomas's argument proves conclusively that if man has first a merely vegetative soul, and secondly a merely sensitive soul, which includes the power of the vegetative soul, and thirdly an intellectual soul, which does the work of all three, that this final intellectual soul is not an evolution of the first two, but a new form that replaces these after they have served their purpose and have been annihilated. It does not even attempt to prove that man really has first a merely vegetative soul, and secondly a sensitive, and lastly an intellectual soul; it supposes all this. It starts out with the erroneous Aristotelian theory and takes it for granted. The reason for this statement is that the rational substantial form requires disposed matter to work upon, and the Thomists suppose (again erroneously) that in the human embryo during the period immediately after conception there is not enough matter to be a receptacle for the rational soul.
The soul according to the Thomists, who use the Aristotelian definition, is the first entelechy of a natural organic body that has life in potency.[41] It is the determination that gives the body its specific and substantial being; the primal actuation of a body or matter, since only in matter is there a distinction between potency for substantial being and substantial actuality. An entelechy is a realization, actuality, full perfection; sight, for example, is the entelechy of the eye. This body is natural, not merely instrumental; it is energized by an immanent principle, not moved by an external force like a tool. The body is also organic; it must have organs, faculties, parts destined to perform definite functions. To say the entelechy has life in potency means that since life, or the operation of the soul, is an immanent act, there must be a receptacle within which it can be immanent, and the soul is the primal actualization of that organic body, which is in potency to produce those immanent actions in which life consists. A body might be in potency while it still has no principle of operation, or, secondly, while it has such a principle but is not using it. In the second condition the human body is in potency for life at the moment of actualization.
A form fixes a thing in its prχοντοσoper species, and the rational soul is such a form for the human body. This substantial form is the completion, perfection, in operability and existence, of the matter that receives it. It is the formal cause of man, not the efficient cause, although it is the efficient cause of subsequent vital operations. An efficient cause makes something numerically different from itself by its own real and physical action; a formal cause and a material cause do not make anything different from themselves numerically, but they intrinsically constitute the effect—they are intrinsic causes.
The human soul as the substantial form virtually contains vegetative and sensory faculties, and through these lower organic capacities it informs and animates the body. That form, together with the matter, the body, does the vital acts of the composite human nature. The rational soul enters the body at the beginning, and first uses its vegetative faculty until the fetus is far enough advanced to be a subject for the action of the sensory faculty of the soul. Later, some time after the birth of the child, when the body is sufficiently formed, the intellectual faculty comes into use.
The nature of a vital principle is that in which it normally issues. If it issues as a rational substantial form, as in man, it was rational from the beginning. If it was not rational from the beginning, a rational principle replaced a sensory vital principle, and that sensory vital principle replaced a vegetative vital principle. The only reason for these replacements would be that the early human embryo, as has been said, lacks organization sufficient to sustain a form higher than a vegetative principle. If this were sufficient reason for deferring the advent of the rational soul, then a baby six months after birth would have no rational soul because it certainly lacks the supposedly requisite organs. However, as the rational soul is whole in each part of the adult body in the totality of its essence and perfection, but not in the totality of its virtue, because certain organs are lacking in particular parts of the body, it is in the embryo whole in the totality of its essence and perfection, but not in its virtue because certain organs are not yet formed, and it is thus from the moment of conception.