The animal soul is likewise a result of an original act of creation, and continued by its processes through the parents, who are now more markedly male and female. The animal seed or germ comes from the male, and the egg in which it grows—corresponding to the earth in which the vegetable seed grew—comes from the mother. The life that is manifested proceeds from the male as to its interior form, for it becomes the replica of the father, but it is modified or qualified by the nature of the mother, just as the seed that falls into the earth, while becoming a replica of the parent plant which grew it, is modified or qualified by the conditions of the soil which receives it.
The earth, in the case of the plant, is the mother, the plant which grew the seed is the father, or serves in that capacity. I know that there will arise in the mind the idea of the male and female function in the flower by means of which the seed is fertilized; but in the truest and most fundamental sense the earth is the mother, for the earth receives the seed, protects it, warms it, nourishes it, modifies it according to its own quality, and thus performs all the mother-function except the preparatory one of
