V. THE ORIGIN OF THE SOUL
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SUMMING up: If all our life is from God, it is evident that the life existing in and manifesting itself through the human soul is life derived from God the Creator, and as we have also seen, the soul-form is only the receptacle of this life. With this idea in mind, let us make another diagram representing the various planes of life and its manifestation from the original source in God down to its lowest manifestation in the outward bodily form of man:
| GOD | THE DIVINE | |||
| MAN | S O U L |
INMOST | INMOST RECEPTACLE OF LIFE FROM GOD | |
| SPIRIT | PLANE OF THE SPIRITUAL OR HEAVENLY LIFE | |||
| MIND | PLANE OF THE NATURAL OR ANIMAL MIND | |||
| B O D Y |
PHYSICAL | MATERIAL BODY IN NATURE OR IN SOLAR SYSTEM | ||
| MATTER | ||||
| Diagram 4 | ||||
Man rests upon matter, has his roots in it, and draws his physical sustenance from it, like a plant, but his soul reaches up through the realm of the spiritual plane by plane to the Divine, from which it draws its entire life.
We can conceive that the Divine influx into man's soul is direct from above, whereas it would appear, from the influx of heat and light and power through the natural sun of our solar system into the solar realm, that the material body receives its life from God through the natural sun. As the material is grosser than the spiritual, or soul life, there would not be any penetration of the spiritual by the grosser influx from the material, whereas there could be and obviously is a penetration of the material by the spiritual. Spirit can in a sense flow into and manifest itself through matter, while matter cannot flow into spirit.
We are discussing the origin of the soul, and we have urged that, if the soul's life is from God—if, indeed, all creation is from Him, then the soul-form itself, which we have seen is man's receptacle of life, is also from Him. As man continues to be man after the death of the material body, and lives as a man forever when the material envelop has perished, it is evident that his soul is in the man form even here and now. Thus, there would seem to be an inner or spiritual body composed of spiritual substances in order to exist in and function in the spiritual world. This is the real, substantial and persisting form in which men live to eternity. The natural body is merely a replica of it, its temporary outer clothing, to put man into touch with the material universe in which he for a time dwells. The soul's interior and permanent expression is the spiritual body—its outward and temporary expression is the natural body.
That there is such a "spiritual body" Paul asserts in the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians, verse 44: "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." It is impossible to conceive of organized spiritual life existing without an appropriate form. Everything must exist in some form, and the obvious form of the soul is the human form, for it produces in its extension into nature the human form. It will be remembered that Paul is explicit about the difference in kind between the natural body and the spiritual body, using many comparisons. In speaking of the resurrection he says: "It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." The natural is visible in nature, but the spiritual is always existing, for "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God," hence the soul-form, without the material body, but in its spiritual organized body, will do so.
Let us not then think of man's soul, or receptacle of life, as a formless something, but as in an organized human form. When in the hereafter it appears, we know from many instances in the Bible that it will appear in the human form, as, for example, when the disciples saw Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration, or when the spiritual world was opened to John in the Isle of Patmos.
There is evidently a vegetable soul, an animal soul, and a human soul, for all outward life must have of necessity its above-nature cause, and its inward spiritual form, that causes it to take form in the outward, to grow, and to develop into the likeness of that from which it proceeded. The material world is merely the world of effects, the spiritual, the world of causes. Any other view is insufficient to account for the effects.
We can imagine the vegetable soul, while inspired from the realm of the spiritual, yet belonging in origin to the lowest unconscious external plane of the spiritual. For the vegetable has no conscious life, no mentality, nothing that pertains to the spiritual, except the instinct to grow.
We can imagine the animal soul because it develops life on the plane of the Mental and Sentient, but not on the plane of Spirit, or regenerate life, to have its soul only in the realm of the spiritual embraced by the Natural Mind in the diagrams we have made.
We perceive that the human soul is, as we have described it, a receptacle of life on the plane first of the Unconscious or Inmost Spiritual, thence upon the plane of Spirit, thence upon the plane of Mind, and manifesting itself through the physical body on the plane of Matter.
Now whence do these receptacles of life come?
The vegetable soul, while a result of creation and continued by its processes, comes from and exists in the seed
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 aiding in the fertilization of the seed, which may be, after all, only a preparatory process within the male. In the case of the reproduction of vegetable life we shall consider the sowing of seed as the fundamental one, and not the new plant resulting from the transplanted offshoot of the parent tree; the latter is rather a continuation of the process of growth; but in every case I feel that the tree or plant serves the father-function, and the earth always the mother-function.[1]
There are many methods or variations of method in the reproduction of created life, whether on the vegetable or animal plane; but in the animal kingdom the process is carried on by male and female in sexually separated individuals.
Certainly when the reproductive function is more clearly distinguished in higher forms of life we perceive that there is the germ of life proceeding from the male deposited in the female, who protects it, warms it, and nourishes it from her own life.
In general we may say that the process of reproduction is carried on in the vegetable kingdom by the planting of the seed in the earth as a mother, and that a similar process is carried on in the animal kingdom by a distinctly indicated male and a distinctly indicated female. The germ of life contained in the seed of the plant or animal would seem to contain what we have called the soul-form, a spiritual something capable of reproducing itself in a new individual of the same species. This soul-form is from the father, and the body which clothes it from the mother.
We are perfectly aware that scientific men will contest our position, insisting that both mother and father contribute equally to the offspring. We admit that they do so in a sense and yet we insist that there is a difference in their contribution. It is the father's soul-life that is perpetuated or reproduced. The mother loses her name in a human family, and her identity is merged into the family of the male. She becomes, as it were, a helper to the male to reproduce himself. We all instinctively recognize the justice of speaking of the sons of Abraham and Jacob rather than of the daughters of their wives. The inheritance is through the sons.
The human soul is reproduced in precisely the same way that the mere animal soul is reproduced, through the instrumentality of parents, the father's life providing the life-germ, or seed, that in which the germ of life exists capable of reproducing itself, and the mother's life providing the soil in which this new germ of life grows. This seems to us entirely self-evident, and it accounts for numberless facts. It is confirmed by reason, and is to us the obvious basis for the perpetuation of human life.
The thing which we wish to emphasize is this: The soul in its incipient form comes from the father and is a projection of the father's life. It is the life-principle capable of reproducing itself. It is the father's life in miniature, shaped in a rudimentary way as a receptacle for the development of a new life. In the ground of the mother's life it receives its physical or material body, plus the modifying influences from her reacting upon the soul-form from the father. This gives a duality to inheritance, but a difference in kind.
The life that flows down from God into this soul-form from the human father is like solar life flowing into the plant organism: it is modified and qualified by the character of the recipient vessel into which it flows. The soul-form from the father planted in the mother reproduces itself under the modifications received from the mother, but it becomes an image or likeness of the father modified by the mother. It is the father that is reproduced, modified by the mother.
Both the life of the human soul and the soul-form itself are actually from God. No human parent creates the soul-form. It is provided by the Creator through the instrumentality of the human father in the human seed, and is a rudimentary reproduction of the father's soul—life. It is, we claim, one of the innumerable facts of life that we know to exist whether we know how to explain it or not. The soul-form is a fact, and we believe it to be as a spiritual entity in the human form, although rudimentary, because it reproduces the human form in its extension into matter.
- ↑ While scientific men may insist that in vegetable reproduction the apparent male and female elements in the plant represent more nearly the father and mother elements, I submit that the earth more perfectly performs the true mother function. While the correctness of this assumption does not appear necessary to prove our fundamental position later developed, still the confirmation of this point by Swedenborg, in his True Christian Religion, No. 585, clearly indicates the analogy and may prove of interest. He says:
"It has been taught by many of the learned that the processes of plant growth, not only of trees, but also of all shrubs, correspond to human prolification. I will, therefore, add something on this subject by way of appendix. In trees and in all other subjects of the vegetable kingdom there are not two sexes, a masculine and a feminine, but everything there is masculine; the earth alone or the soil is the common mother, and is thus, as it were, feminine; for it receives the seeds of all fruits, opens them, carries them as it were in a womb, and then nourishes them and brings them forth, that is, ushers them into the light of day, and afterward clothes and sustains them.
"When a seed is first opened by the earth, it begins with a root, which is a kind of heart; from this it emits and transmits sap, like blood, and so forms, as it were, a body provided with limbs; its body is the trunk itself, while the branches and their branchlets are its limbs. The leaves which it puts forth immediately after its birth serve as lungs; for as the heart without the lungs produces no motion or sensation, and it is by means of these that man is made alive, so the root without leaves does not cause a tree or shrub to vegetate. The blossoms which precede the fruit are means for purifying the sap, the tree's blood, for separating its grosser from its purer elements, for forming a new little trunk for the influx of these purer elements contained in the bosom of this sap, through which trunk the purified sap may flow in and thus initiate and gradually form the fruit (which may be compared to the testis) in which the seed is perfected.
"The vegetative soul which inmostly governs in every particle of sap, or which is its prolific essence, is from no other source than the heat of the spiritual world; and as this heat is from the spiritual sun there, it aspires to nothing but generation, and a continuation of creation thereby; and because it essentially aspires to the generation of man, it induces upon whatever it generates a certain resemblance to man.
"That no one may be astonished at this statement; that the subjects of the vegetable kingdom are masculine only, and that the earth alone, or the soul, is like a common mother, or is like the feminine, let it be illustrated by something similar among bees. According to the observation of Swammerdam, reported in his Books of Nature, bees have only one common mother, from which the offspring of the entire hive is produced. As there is but one common mother for these little insects, why not the same for all plants?
"That the earth is a common mother may also be illustrated spiritually; and is so illustrated by the fact that in the Word 'the earth' signifies the Church, and the Church is a common mother, and is so called in the Word. . .
"But the earth or the soil can enter into the inmost of a seed, even to its prolific principle, calling this forth and giving it circulation, because every least particle of dust or powder exhales from its essence a kind of subtle, penetrating effluvium, which is an effect of the active force of the heat from the spiritual world."