ible that forms were rather derived from the active potency of
the efficient cause (that is to say, either from that of God in the [171]
case of Creation or from that of other forms in the case of generation),
than from the passive potency of matter. And that, in the case of
generation, meant a return to traduction. Daniel Sennert, a famous doctor
and physicist at Wittenberg, cherished this opinion, particularly in
relation to animate bodies which are multiplied through seed. A certain
Julius Caesar della Galla, an Italian living in the Low Countries, and a
doctor of Groningen named Johan Freitag wrote with much vehemence in
opposition to Sennert. Johann Sperling, a professor at Wittenberg, made a
defence of his master, and finally came into conflict with Johann Zeisold,
a professor at Jena, who upheld the belief that the human soul is created.

89. But traduction and eduction are equally inexplicable when it is a
question of finding the origin of the soul. It is not the same with
accidental forms, since they are only modifications of the substance, and
their origin may be explained by eduction, that is, by variation of
limitations, in the same way as the origin of shapes. But it is quite
another matter when we are concerned with the origin of a substance, whose
beginning and destruction are equally difficult to explain. Sennert and
Sperling did not venture to admit the subsistence and the indestructibility
of the souls of beasts or of other primitive forms, although they allowed
that they were indivisible and immaterial. But the fact is that they
confused indestructibility with immortality, whereby is understood in the
case of man that not only the soul but also the personality subsists. In
saying that the soul of man is immortal one implies the subsistence of what
makes the identity of the person, something which retains its moral
qualities, conserving the _consciousness_, or the reflective inward
feeling, of what it is: thus it is rendered susceptible to chastisement or
reward. But this conservation of personality does not occur in the souls of
beasts: that is why I prefer to say that they are imperishable rather than
to call them immortal. Yet this misapprehension appears to have been the
cause of a great inconsistency in the doctrine of the Thomists and of other
good philosophers: they recognized the immateriality or indivisibility of
all souls, without being willing to admit their indestructibility, greatly
to the