These last words are used in a large sense to mean the formation and disintegration of whatever is composed of the four elements.
But the annual circuit of the sun does more than bring to pass the rhythmic changes of the seasons with their effects upon man's environment. To the sun's circuit man owes his life. Aristotle has said to us already: "Man and the sun generate man," in words which have no biological context.[338] He does better when he enumerates among the "causes" of a man these three: his father, the sun, and "the oblique circle," i.e., the ecliptic. These he styles "efficient[397] causes" of man,[398] as we have heard him style "the circle of the sun's course" the "efficient cause" of the mighty changes in inanimate things. We learn in what sense a father is the "efficient cause" of his offspring when Aristotle says: "The female always provides the matter, while the male provides that which fashions it";[399] and when we are told that this matter provided by the female "is quickened by the principle derived from the male, which thus perfects the animal";[400] "the animal" meaning the product of conception. "The body," says Aristotle further, "is from the female, but the soul from the male."[401] For although he says elsewhere that "Genesis is the first obtaining in heat of a share of nutritive soul, and life is the tarrying thereof";[402] although he concedes a share of this lowest kind of soul to wind-eggs, to plants, and to the humblest things which live; nevertheless, he holds that, where the sexes are divided, the indispensable "sensory soul" which distinguishes the animal from the plant is derived from the male parent only.[403] So the seminal fluid and the solar rays are coupled together as "efficient causes" of man; and thus the moving sun is made responsible, by what chain of causation we are not told expressly, for the results of sexual generation.
From this we may turn now to other forms of generation in the light of the following prodigious analogy. Aristotle says:—
"We call 'male' an animal which engenders within another, and 'female' one which engenders within itself; and, therefore, in the case of the universe the earth's nature is held to be female and maternal, while heaven and the sun and other such are called engenderers and fathers."[404]
Next, after these sweeping generalities, let us peruse Aristotle's account of spontaneous generation. He says:—
"Animals and plants arise in earth and in moisture, because in earth there is water and in water there is air,[319] and in all air there is psychical heat; so that in a certain sense all things are full of soul. Therefore, when once inclusion of this[405] has taken place, an individual is quickly formed.[406] Inclusion takes place and a kind of foam-bubble arises, produced by the heating of moisture which has body[407] of its own."[408]
The last expression in this passage evidently means moisture which is charged with earthy matter in solution; for Aristotle says in the same treatise that seawater "has much more body" than drinking-water.[409] Still speaking of spontaneous generation he says a little further on:—
"Whoever would inquire aright should ask: What product in such cases answers to that material principle which in the female is a certain animal excretion,[410] potentially similar to what it came from? That excretion is quickened by the principle derived from the male, which thus perfects the animal. In the present case what should be likened to that excretion, and whence and what is the quickening principle which answers to the principle from the male? Now we must assume that, even in animals which procreate, the heat within the animal[411] separates and concocts, and thus makes out of the nourishment which enters the animal the excretion which is the beginning of the embryo. Such is the case with plants likewise; although in these and in some animals there is no need of the principle imparted by the male, for this they have within and mingled with themselves; whereas in most animals the excretion aforesaid stands in need of that principle. The nourishment of some is water and earth, that of others is derived from water and earth; so that what the heat in animals[412] prepares out of their nourishment, the heat of the season in the circumambient air combines by concoction out of the sea and the earth, and puts together.[413] But so much of the psychical principle as is included or separated within the air[319] constructs and quickens[414] the embryo. In like manner are put together such plants as arise by spontaneous generation."[415]