se and organs of motion
and members and viscera that are actuated by brains, hearts, and lungs.
So the subjects of the vegetable kingdom send down a root into the ground,
and bring forth stem, branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds. Both
the animal and the vegetable kingdoms, as regards the production of their
forms, derive their origin from spiritual influx and operation out of the
sun of heaven where the Lord is, and not from the influx and operation of
nature out of her sun; from this they derive nothing except their fixation,
as was said above. All animals, great and small, derive their origin from
the spiritual in the outmost degree, which is called the natural; man
alone from all three degrees, called the celestial, spiritual, and natural.
As each degree of height or discrete degree decreases from its perfection
to its imperfection, as light to shade, by continuity, so do animals;
there are therefore perfect, less perfect, and imperfect animals. The
perfect animals are elephants, camels, horses, mules, oxen, sheep, goats,
and others which are of the herd or the flock; the less perfect are birds;
and the imperfect are fish and shell-fish; these, as being the lowest of
that degree, are as it were in shade, while the former are in light. Yet
animals, since they live only from the lowest spiritual degree, which is
called the natural, can look nowhere else than towards the earth and to
food there, and to their own kind for the sake of propagation; the soul
of all these is natural affection and appetite. The subjects of the
vegetable kingdom comprise, in like manner, the perfect, less perfect,
and imperfect; the perfect are fruit trees, the less perfect are vines
and shrubs, and the imperfect are grasses. But plants derive from the
spiritual out of which they spring that they are uses, while animals
derive from the spiritual out of which they spring that they are
affections and appetites, as was shown above.

347. (7) Each of these forms receives with its existence the means of
propagation. In all products of the earth, which pertain, as was said
above, either to the vegetable or to the animal kingdom, there is a kind
of image of creation, and a kind of image of man, and also a kind of image
of the infinite and the eternal; this was shown above (n. 313-318); also
that the image of the infinite and the eternal is clearly manifest in the
capacity of all these for infinite and eternal propagation. They all,
therefore,