Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

Of all these hundreds of germs it requires only a single one to combine with an ovum, or a similar little cell of the female, to constitute conception. When this combination has been accomplished, a new being is inaugurated, another human soul is started out, by the magic wand of nature, to go through the different spheres of evolution, of whose ultimatum we can have no clear conception, but this is perfectly clear, that after this coalescence of the two germs, the die is cast and the female becomes then only the vehicle in which the creative forces are effecting their elaboration.

Coition and conception are widely different processes, and require to be separately analyzed to be understood.

Coition is always a physical act, a gratification of the senses, and, like many other human passions, is often abused by excessive indulgence, degenerating into lust.

Conception, on the other hand, is purely passive, an organic function, without consciousness on the part of the female.

Thus far there is a similarity in the organic processes of conception in all mammalia, so that their embryos cannot be classified and assigned to their respective species in the early stages of their development. Physiologists are unable to say whether the one belongs to and will ultimately develop into a brute animal or a human being, yet one has the attributes of mental force, the elements of a soul, while the other is to follow a blind instinct, without the possibility of spiritual perception. Conception, in the one case, is simply a vegetative or organic function, while in the other there is, in addition, a spiritual effort to individualize a human soul.

The creative energy of nature is separate and independent of the sexual act, for it does not take place during copulation of the sexes, nor immediately after it, but hours or days after the act is accomplished.

I am often called upon to say when and where the human soul becomes associated with the human body?

There is a divine life, or spiritual energy, that animates the soul from the spiritual realm. It is the correspondency of the physical force that animates the physical body.

The term or phrase which I employ to designate this force is of less importance than the definition which is given to it, and upon this, of course, we must agree. I recognize in such an energy or power, the primal cause or force, behind and beyond the phenomena of nature. This force must be universal and omnipresent, hence spiritual; it must be the central source of supply for all spiritual things, so that the doctrine of Paul is scientifically in harmony with a rationalistic view of the subject, when he says “in Him we live and move and have our being.”

The science of the conservation of forces teaches, that forces are never lost, that they are indestructible and eternal. We derive our spiritual existence from this central spiritual sun and inherit the quality of eternity with it. Mind is spirit and the soul is mind; this is the view of Spinoza, who, in the second part of his work “Ethics,” employs the terms synonymously throughout the chapter “Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind or Soul.” Mind differentiates man from the inferior animal creations, and can make him what he will.