Part 2, Chapter IV

HEREDITY

1.     The induced nature of parents is transmitted to their posterity.⁽²⁷⁸⁾ Hence infants are of different genius (celestial or spiritual) and of different natural dispositions.⁽²⁷⁹⁾

   
       The affections of the parents are not transmitted, but only their inclinations and faculties.⁽²⁸⁰⁾ Good is connate, but not truth.⁽²⁸¹⁾ The hereditary will is "an involuntary derived through the parents".⁽²⁸²⁾

    There are four kinds of heredities.⁽²⁸³⁾ The character of heredity depends on the state of the parents at the time of the unition.⁽²⁸⁴⁾

2. Hereditary evils.⁽²⁸⁵⁾

    All hereditary evils are seated in the natural mind, not in the spiritual mind.⁽²⁸⁶⁾ By evils of heredity are not meant 'original sin', or a condemnation of the race owing to the sin of "Adam."⁽²⁸⁷⁾ Hereditary evils are now more malignant than formerly,⁽²⁸⁸⁾ having been multiplied generation by generation.⁽²⁸⁹⁾ Man's hereditary proprium is therefore p. 75 nothing but evil;⁽²⁹⁰⁾ even with infants who die.⁽²⁹¹⁾ It includes all evils,⁽²⁹²⁾ yet it is diverse in genius and nature.⁽²⁹³⁾ Nonetheless every man born can be saved.⁽²⁹⁴⁾ From the worst perverts, children seldom are born.⁽²⁹⁵⁾

    Natural good is connate with some, but it is prone to all evils and falsities.⁽²⁹⁶⁾ Natural good appears as a softness of heart which acts like a spurious conscience.⁽²⁹⁷⁾

    Hereditary evils are permitted, lest men should be deprived of delights.⁽²⁹⁸⁾ Hereditary evils, since the Fall, prevent man from being born into the order of his life.⁽²⁹⁹⁾

3. Hereditary evils from the father are more interior than those from the mother.⁽³⁰⁰⁾

    They remain in the child and cannot be eradicated even after death.⁽³⁰¹⁾ The paternal inheritance cannot be broken in the posterity except by regeneration⁽³⁰²⁾, or by the spiritual things of the church (i.e., change of religion⁽³⁰³⁾), and then only the heredity from the nearest ancestors.⁽³⁰⁴⁾
    (What about the heredity from the more distant ancestors? This line of reasoning creates a problem with preformation) [Source of question unknown.  ORO]
p. 76
    The image of the father is implanted in the body, first obscurely, then more and more evidently, as the son applies himself to the studies and offices of the father.⁽³⁰⁵⁾

4. The maternal heredity is added to the father's.⁽³⁰⁶⁾ It is vitiated by hereditary evils yet is of temporary service in reformation.⁽³⁰⁷⁾

    Its exterior evils are "a corporeal something which is dispersed when man regenerates."⁽³⁰⁸⁾ It tempers that paternal heredity.⁽³⁰⁹⁾ (Note: Swedenborg apparently regards maternal heredity as being communicated throughout the process of gestation.⁽³¹⁰⁾)
    The mother contributes the body itself, the natural, all that is external⁽³¹¹⁾, all the material ⁽³¹²⁾ which gives the clothing.⁽³¹³⁾ The formation to the full is from the mother.⁽³¹⁴⁾ Nothing of man's life is from the mother.⁽³¹⁵⁾ The maternal heredity can easily be eradicated.⁽³¹⁶⁾

    The father determines the racial color or quality,⁽³¹⁷⁾ or the child's interior genius ⁽³¹⁸⁾ and sex.⁽³¹⁹⁾

    The likeness is to either parent, the father's likeness still remaining within.⁽³²⁰⁾ It is tempered by education.⁽³²¹⁾ The child recedes from the paternal likeness as he grows up.⁽³²²⁾ Hereditary evils are present in man's every affection⁽³²³⁾ and are called forth in certain stages of life.⁽³²⁴⁾ The heredity is broken and altered by a life of charity,⁽³²⁵⁾ by Conjugial Love.⁽³²⁶⁾

    Hereditary evils cause a closing of the spiritual mind⁽³²⁷⁾ and so a reaction against God ⁽³²⁸⁾

    With a young child, hereditary evils appear tempered with goods,⁽³²⁹⁾ and the paternal evil is then veiled over with innocent and amiable traits; but as he grows up he comes at last into his father's ruling love, which, if evil, must be tempered and bent by teachers and set aside by regeneration.⁽³³⁰⁾

    The offspring is not blamed for hereditary evils, unless they are made actual from his own understanding and will.⁽³³¹⁾ If shunned, such evils do not normally recur after death, nor is man judged by them.⁽³³²⁾ Such evils are sometimes recalled with angels to remind them that all good is from the Lord.⁽³³³⁾


Note:
    The Teaching in DP 277 is in apparent contradiction with the recognized Mendelian "law", yet it refers not primarily to color but to inner quality.


    Offspring born of two who are in love truly Conjugial derive from their parents the Conjugial of good and truth, from which they have an inclination, and faculty, if a son, for perceiving the things which are of wisdom, and if a daughter, for living the things which wisdom teaches.⁽³³⁴⁾

    Connate or natural good is not spiritual unless tempered by influx of charity and faith from the Lord.⁽³³⁵⁾p. 79

Therefore Maternal heredity is handed on by a father if he spiritually appropriates her influence -- in his germ plasm, or "soul" (spiritual).

Maternal heredity is handed on by a mother to the child as an external influence which can be put off by the child. If put off by a son it is not handed on to the next generation. If appropriated by a son it is handed on to his children.

Paternal heredity --- as influenced by spiritual appropriations of influences of mother or wife--- is always carried to future generations until changed by degrees through religious changes (regeneration or degeneration).

p.79 B

Heredity Phil 10

Notes on Fritz Kahn's "Man in Structure and Function", p. 16

In maturation of ripening sex cells, the chromosomes do not split lengthwise as in ordinary cell division (mitosis), but half the chromosomes pass to one "daughter cell" and half to another. Thus the original number of chromosomes is reduced by half.

Since the chromosomes carry the factors which determine the hereditary characteristics, and no two chromosomes are identical in composition, this makes for a varied heredity - sex among others.

Question ? What makes for the normal racial form of the body of the offspring, then?

Answer: The soul acting through the male sperm. Divine Providence acts through the soul.

Question ? Where does the soul dwell ?

Answer: In the centrosome, which selects the chromosomes. (?) The male centrosome, in the zygote, starts the cell division which makes the embryo.

Sperm Phil 10

Head: Mostly chromatin, the hereditary material derived from the father, with the genes of sexual and other characteristics.

Middle: the centrosome, the "motor" of the sperm cell, placed in a cylindrical body with a spiral fiber passing around it. From the centrosome and the long fiber, called the "axial filament", passes right through the body and tail of the sperm.

Tail: The longest part of the sperm, acts as a propeller, moving with rhythmic spiral and lateral motions.

(From Kahn, "Man in Structure and Function")

The Question of "Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics"

USSR Official Doctrine ?

N C Doctrine ?

Does it apply to physical features ?

How about crossings & mutations ?

How about intellectual and spiritual heredity ?

(The ~law" (negative) considers the influence of the physical environment only).

Sex Determination

Stromberg ("Soul of the Universe"), p. 62

Female birds determine the sex --- eggs have either

+X or +Y, while sperm all have X chromosomes !

This is opposite to most mammals - p. 62 - cf. p. 213.

The Chemical Basis of Heredity. A symposium. McElroy & Gloss

p. 55 Crick also p. 25.

The Cell. A Scope monograph on cytology. Upjohn Co. p. 13 from CRP

HEREDITY CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE

By Hugo Lj. Odhner

The doctrine of the Divine Trinity as presented in the Writings rests on the concept that the soul or the offspring is derived by generation from the soul of the father. Thus the Lord Jesus Christ had His Divine and infinite Soul from Jehovah God. This concept is called "traducian" and the historians of Philosophy frequently note that Aristotle stressed this idea, which is sometimes classed as one of his many "mistakes".    Thus Erdmann summarizes Aristotle's view as follows: "The altogether more imperfect female supplies the matter in the menses, and the male the form in the seed which contains an etherlike quality. And as in the act of generation so in its product also, the corporeal element is to be derived from the maternal and the psychical from the paternal element.

Three Theories as to the Origin of the Soul

.

From Plato's teachings about metemphychosis??? there had come the idea that the souls of men were pre-existant and joined the body at birth. Thus Origan?? c' Alexandria pictured the spirit or rational part of the soul as the "pneuma" which came down from the angelic sphere where it had existed before the time of Adam. Human souls were angels and their imprisonment in the flesh was a penalty for their apostasy

Jerome over a century later taught "creationism" - that God creates an individual dual soul out of nothing when a man is horn and infuses it into the body.   Earlier Tertullian had written profusely on kindred subjects. He admitted that God had created a soul and body for Adam a nihilo, but that Eve and the rest of the human race had been "generated"; i.e., the soul of a child came from the soul of the parent, just like the body came from the bodies of the parents, Thus a mode was found to account for the transmission of Adam's original sin.* Augustine was somewhat uncertain in his references to this theory, which had become known as as "traducian" since it regarded the soul of the child as a graft (tradux) from the pa rent's soul. The Schoolmen later discarded the view, in favor of Creationism but the Lutheran divines generally accepted it.

The Doctrine of the New Church

The Writings present it as a general law that the soul and "all the spiritual" of the child is from the father (T. 92, 103). The body, and "all the material" which man has at birth, is from the mother. The "soul" here means not only the inmost esse, or the very essence from which the offspring is, but also the interior man or spirit, or the interiors of the father's mind: his mens, his animus, his disposition , inclination, and affections. (A. 5689:3, 6716:2, 3299, Ath.Cr, 30, 215, 216; A. 1815, C.L.172, T.l03,) Thus the inherited soul includes something from all degrees of the father's mind.

* Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, ii p. 13ff.

These spiritual degrees are described as existing in man's "primitive" which was spiritually represented to Swedenborg as a congery of receptacles resembling a brain containing two interior degrees of interlacing spherules, each arranged in hemispheres. The lowest of these degrees, or the form as a whole, was seen to be in pervert order and to be the lodgement of inherited evils. (W. 432, cf Div. Wis. iii.4. In these teachings as Swedenborg opposes the error of his contemporaries who had been led astray into the theory of "Preformation", which taught that man's primitive had all the organs in miniature.

Evil can arise only in the "ultimate spiritual degree", or in the natural mind, and then only while the spiritual substances of that mind are in connection with those finest substances of nature which "recede" from the spiritual at death. (W.345, 257). But the resulting evil tones are substances such as are in the hells, and can be propagated by way of inheritance .

The seed

Propagation of the paternal inheritance involves that the finest substances of nature must be called in to form a "seed" - a receptacle adequate to convey the soul or the spiritual , both the good and the evil to the maternal egg-cell. .

The spiritual, which is "a graft (tradux) or offset of the father's soul in its fulness" is therefore provided with "a certain envelope from the elements of nature through which (per haec) its body is formed in the womb" (T.103). "In the seed of man is his soul in perfect human form, veiled over with substances from the purest things of nature, out which (act) quibus) a body is formed in the womb" (C.L.183).

Although the body, yea, "all the material", or all that is from the "natural world" is from the mother, yet the finest things of nature are seemingly part of the elements contributed by the father. And at death  he retains "the spiritual which he had from the father together with a certain limbus from the purest things of nature around it" (T.103). It is also said that "the seed is what is clothed with a body by the mother" (P.277a). The seed is only a hundredth of a millimeter long when it enters the egg-cell . Unless we wish to split hairs, can we not say that the mother contributes "all" the material? But there is some-thing of the body from the father also, apparently; and the infant's body tends to resemble the father's image more persistently than the mother's. On the other hand, there is a mental inheritance from the mother also. The soul of the father can be propagated without loss, being a spiritual substance which has not extension but only "impletion" (C.L. 220). The seed has therefore a spiritual origin and is said to be "conceived" interiorly in the father's understanding, and formed in his will (T.584). It is then clothed, not only by the finest substances of nature but also by a,? the degrees of the body fluids by which it is fashioned into seed, or semen.

Swedenborg's Physiological Teachings

The work on the "Origin and Propagation of the Soul" states that in the genital organs of the male "are conceived the first rudiments of a brain, that is, the purer cortex which, later on, is contained in the cortical gland; and thus that from this, as from an inchoament of a to=, are projected organic forms which afterwards in the ovum and womb of the mother, succesively progress and thus produce a body always, however, under the auspices of this little brain". (P.P.S.ii.,ii, cf R. Psych. 424). (In the Rational Psychology,the "purer cortex" or "simple cortex" la called the "pure intellectory".)

When the sperm is approaching the ovum, it is, Swedenborg surmises, in the fore of seminal globules. Thus the seed enters the ovum, not in the form of "little eels" as was thought by his contemporaries but globules which are "unlocked and opened" into "a kind of vital aura" (Generation, n.174). The supreme animal essence then commences its for- work by conceiving a brain in purest effigy such as it is in the depths of the cortical substance and from many such brains it extends itself into a carina by means of simple fibres and by stages and degrees rsaYe3 the texture of the body. (Caner. 175).

The Maternal Heredity

The paternal soul-graft, carried within the seed in the male spirituous fluid and simple cortex, thus weaves the egg-cell into a new individual. It is then pertinent to ask what becomes of the maternal soul which surely must have inhabited the ovum. And not only the maternal soul, but also the spirituous fluid of the mother's own body which must have been bathing the inmost tissues of the little egg-cell! It is shown in the Economy of the Animal Kingdom that the fertilized egg contains a formative substance or force which is responsible for the formation of the embryo (E.A.K.,i., 247. 253ff). The Maternal soul must have retreated when the egg was fertilized. Otherwise, then, how could it be said that the soul is from the father?

Yet during pregnancy, especially in the early stages, the mother supplies es even of her purest blood, that is, the spirituous fluid, as food for the embryo! (Gener.280). Of course, the spirituous fluid is not the soul. And the blood of the mother, except for some white corpuscles that may sneak through the cell walls, does not pass into the embryo as such, but is merely the source of aliment and oxygen so far as these substances are selected by the bloodstream of the embryo.

The maternal heredity is therefore conveyed by various modes. Modern science focusses the attention solely on the egg-cell, with its chromosomes and genes in which the characteristics of the maternal organism are believed to be resident. But no one egg contains more than half of the total number of the chromosomes characteristic of the mother's organism. Exactly which twenty-four of the forty-eight maternal chromosome types shall be handed on to the offspring depends entirely on a selection which occurs while the ovum is being prepared; a selection which some may attribute to Providence, some to accident, some to the inner states of the mother herself.

In his Rational Psychology Swedenborg stresses another maternal influence which he evidently regards as part of the paternal heredity. For all manner of pre-natal impressions are communicated to the embryo from the pregnant mother, as well as actual nutriment affected by the state of the mother's constitution. "Immediately from the parent is introduced the soul with its pure intellectory, in which similar substances are procreated in order, while the mother furnishes in the ovum every external form for the use of the soul and supplies what the liquids should contain. But because the sensories of the mother communicate with the embryo in an intimate way it follows that the infant ought to assume the genius of the mother mixed with the genius of the parent; for in the offspring there is the soul of the father but the animus of both." (R. Psych.424). The mother therefore affects the internal sensory of the offspring and thus actress in memory, imagination, and understanding.

Whatsoever of evil (vitium) the mother contributes, is, however, external, and merely prevents the soul's operations in that lower sphere.

That the hereditary evils from the mother are relatively external and can easily be eradicated, while the paternal cannot, is plain from the Writings. (A.4317:4, T.103).

The Testimony of Modern Observations

Although it is admitted that other parts of the germ-cells may have an influence or hereditary transmissions of characteristics, the general agreement of scientists seems to be that the physical basis of paternal and maternal inheritance lies in the twenty-four chromosomes which each parent contributes for the construction of the first cell of the embryo: a cell designated as the zygote and having forty-eight chromosomes like all the body cells of the human species.

From the study of insects and animals it appears that all observable hereditary and racial characteristics and body features lodge in the chromosomes which are organized strands or stainable fibres collected in the nucleus of each cell. Every chromosome represents a different group of characteristics, and each of these is seated in one or more "genes" contained in the chromosome.

Each primitive germ-cell (in either sex) contains fortyeight chromosomes, but by a selective division-process it splits into cells having only twenty-four, and each of these twenty-four is "derived" either from the adult's father or from his mother. Heredity is thus primarily determined by the particular chromosomes which have "happened" to combine into any one spermatozoon or into any one egg-cell. Each sperm and each egg therefore differ in their hereditary elements. And it has lately been claimed that some sections of a chromosome containing some distinct set of genes may cross over to another chromosome while they lie side by side or are intertwined; so that the chromosomes themselves may change their characteristics, almost indefinitely.* The thought that this interchange is controlled by quantum-mechanics and physical laws of statistical tendency, does not prevent such a physicist as Erwin Schrodinger from asserting that the individual (however impermanent he may be) really controls the motion of the atoms.**

One important discovery lately made was that the male germ-cells, during the aforesaid division-process, turned into two different types of spermatozoa, one capable of conceiving only sons and the other capable of conceiving only daughters. The observable difference lay in the presence of a peculiar chromosome called "y" which is always present in the male body-cells and is always absent in the bodies of females. The determination of sex is thus definitely demonstrated to be a function of the father's seed. Every cell of the future infant's body is determined by the paternal sperm to be either male or female. It is to be noted, however, that although sex is thus dependent on certain chromosomes from the father, sex is not therefore necessarily determined by the chromosomes but may have another cause. The other hereditary qualities lodging in the chromosomes seem to be qualities usual in either mother or father or in both. But New Church doctrine speaks of a special and additional function of the paternal sperm - the function of furnishing an internal heredity of inner genius and mental type and of transmitting a graft of the paternal soul itself. And it is shown that even the soul partakes of sex - that there is nothing in soul, in mind, or in body, which is not masculine in the male and feminine in the female. (C.L.46, 220:2).

The Function of the Centrosome

It is therefore of interest to note a further observation made by histologists. The active element which takes the initiative in all "mitosis" or cell-division is the centrosome, which is situated in the cytoplasm of each cell, just outaide of its nucleus. The active center of the centrosome is called the centriole, and this divides into two, each part forming the source of a radiation or "aster", thus constituting a spindle with two poles, which direct the division of the nucleus. In the sperm, the centrosome is in the "middle-piece". (See Diagram). When entering the ovum the paternal sperm loses its tailpiece. The middle-piece, which contains the centrosome, takes the lead in approaching the pronucleus of the egg-cell, and the head-piece, containing the pronucleus and the twenty-four chromosomes of the sperm, lags behind, as relatively passive.

As early as 1887 it was definitely claimed by Boveri that the matured egg-cell at this stage did not have a centrosome, but that after the union of the two germ-cells in fertilization, the single centrosome brought in by the spermatozoon "divides to form two centres about which are developed the two asters of the cleavage figure". (Cited by Wilson,

* Schrodinger, "What is Life", Cambridge and New York 1946, page 26. ** Ibid., Epilogue.

The obvious conclusion is that the male sperm contributes that vital element which will build the future body of the offspring

The Centrosome, and Swedenborg's "Simple Cortex"

In claiming that the vital organism and organizing force in the seed is a "simple cortex" or "pure intellectory", which is like a first point of life from which the soul extends simple fibres "like rays of its intellectual light", Swedenborg seems to describe something which in an uncanny way resembles the centrosome of the spermatozoon. And this almost a century and a half before the centrosome was discovered! The delicate filaments which form the axis of the tail-piece of the rear projections from the centriole of the centrosome or but they are withdrawn and the tail piece is separated at. _???_ conjunction with the ovum. Instead out of the centrosome proceeds that marvelous organic star radiation which proceeds the egg-cell and initiates the whole series of call

whereby the tissues of the entire embryonic body appear to be spermatozoon middlepiece, the moment of ceeds to ceeds to divisions formed.

To identify the centrosome with the simple cortex is hardly prudent. But the centrosome, and especially that almost invisible and evanescent little centriole which constitutes the active point in the centrosome and which is the first thing to divide into two in order to produce the creative spheres or "asters", are apparently the organic outlines or traces of the action of the "simple cortex" and the simple fibres which it sends forth. Swedenborg indicates that this simple cortex produces many such centers as itself in the course of producing them both. ???

The simple cortex is not the soul. But it is the organic center of the soul's activities in the body, and in it the spiritual part of man, which we call his mind, focuses its influx of good and evil. (R. Psych. 423 f). According to Swedenborg it is therefore the carrier of paternal heredity which includes more than that external inheritance which is transmitted from the mother.

That the maternal heredity cannot determine sex is an indication of the truth that the mother's contribution is more superficial and more easily changed or dispersed. At least in the matter of sex, the paternal heredity prevails to eternity and can never be eradicated. The doctrine goes even farther, saying that "hereditary evil from the father remains to eternity, for it cannot possibly be eradicated" (A.1573). By regeneration, these paternal evils can however be removed out of harm's way, and what has thus been shunned will not be handed on to the offspring (A. 4317:4).

So far as the two chromosome sets from father and mother can be observed, it would appear that the paternal heredity is just as external as the mother's and subject to the same selective processes. As to the body, the offspring may resemble either of the parents. The father like the mother hands on only half of his chromosomes to the offspring. And undoubtedly the state of each parent influences the selection, on which much of the hopes for the moral and physical regeneration of the race may depend. In sex determination, the ovum may be more receptive of masculine (or "Y") sperms than of feminine (or "X") sperms; and one of these types of sperms may be more active than the other; so that sex may ultimately be determined by the state of both parents at conception. (Cf. A. 3469:3.)

It seems reasonable to suppose that the Spiritual or more profound heredity from the father will not only select the sex factor ("X" or "Y") in each sperm, but will also (for good or for ill) organize the rest of the chromosomes and determine the "crossings over" which alter their character. And in merging with the egg-cell, the paternal chromosomes will conjoin themselves with the maternal chromosomes according to the pattern which best harmonizes with the "soul" of the father.

What parts of the more internal heredities of the father are resident in the centrosome of the sperm, can of course not be determined. But if the resemblance of the centrosome to the "simple cortex" has any significance, it would seem that it contains the formative force of the spirituous fluid to fashion the embryo to the "coda" of the existing chromosome patterns. This force is unaffected by man's good or evil nature, being able to construct a racially perfect human body even when the mind is pervert. (Cf E.A.K., ii. 314, 315.) Since the determination of sex must come from the very inmost of the spirit, this ought also to be a function exercised through the centrosome in any given spermatozoon. Yet the selection of an "X" or a "Y" sperm in conjugation seems - as was shown - to be dependent on more temporary factors, possibly involving the states of both parents.

It is to be noted that the centrosome is the organizing force in the formation of egg-cells as well as in the formation of sperms. But the centrosome of the matured ovum retreats at conjugation before the centrosome of the sperm just as the "soul" of. the mother must retreat from the ovum when the soul-graft from the father takes over the control of the body-building process. The ovum becomes passive, as a plane that is to be infilled with the life of the paternal soul.

Exceptional Instances and Genetic Laws

A study of Genetics is called for in connection with several "problems" arising out of New Church doctrines and out of the illustrations used in the Writings which do not on the surface seem to agree with modern observations. Such a problem is that of "sexes" in plants, which should be studied as an analogy of spermatogenesis and the occurrence of "haploid generations".

-8-

The question of Parthenogenesis or "virgin-birth" has become of interest to biologists as well as to theologians. In some species of plants and insects there is an alternation of sexual with asexual generations, or a production of an intermediate generation of individuals which are the results of unfertilized eggs. Such individuals are haploid, i.e., all their body cells contain only half the number of chromosomes which distinguishes the species. Among bees, unfertilized eggs become fertile males which are called "drones", while the fertilized eggs become females; but one female only (the queen-bee) becomes fertile, and the rest are sterile "workers". The drone has no father. It has been compared to a grossly exaggerated spermatozoon, but it is actually an individual in which all the body-cells are like germ-cells.

The laws of heredity are more complex than can easily be grasped, and what we rightly call a Miracle has usually its established parallels in the much varied processes of nature.

Conclusion

What is the bearing of these groups of alleged facts upon the doctrine of the Lord's Incarnation?

To me, they supply confirmations in scientific and acknowledged terms, of a number of revealed teachings about heredity which can thus be seen in somewhat more distinct light.

1. The ether contributes the dynamic factor in her heredity which constructs the body of the embryo and is eternal and persistent.

2. Certain, but not all, of the already inherited characteristics of the mother are unconsciously selected by her during the process of meiosis whereby her primitive germ-cells are divided by "reduction" and result in the formation of the matured ovum where these selected characteristics are made organically transmissable to the offspring in the form of "chromosomes".

3. The same process occurs in the father, whereby his inherited characteristics are variously conjoined and separated, and certain ones are selected for transmission through the chromosomes of the sperm. By "crossings", "linkage", and "mutations", a process is available by which the characteristics of an individual can be imposed on the chromosomes and transferred to the next generation.

4. With the Lord, the Soul was the infinite love of Jehovah God, which wove the body in the womb of Mary; yet without the limitation or perversion which are present in the "paternal heredity" of a human father, which so qualify a human offspring from within that they cannot be eradicated to eternity. The Lord as to His Human Essence was therefore the Divine truth proceeding from the Divine good, as long as He was in the rorld.

(insert at x) following par. 3 of Conclusion on p. C-24-K:)

In every case, however, the selection of chromosomes from father and mother is such that they complete the potential pattern of a human individual. The soul from the father is what really selects the essential elements of the human form.

-9-

5. The ovum of Mary was the carrier of a racial and personal heredity of an external nature, and this was present in the form of chromosomes in the nucleus of every cell in the Lord's body, and was a basis for an influx from all the hells.

The physical basis of maternal heredity would thus consist in a disorderly arrangement and "crossings" of the nuclear elements. This heredity, with the Lord, could be so reordered and dispersed by regeneration that the body of the Lord could eventually be purified of all evil tendency and in time be glorified and freed of all its finite limitations.

The difficulty of conceiving of the nature of such maternal heredity is lessened if we note that the hells inflow into evil ultimates and can there be perceived as reactions of a perverse kind. The Lord's "sensual man" was in the tendency to constant rebellion as to its voluntary (A.5157), and thus the reactions that the Lord perceived from the sensual were not only felt as evil cupidities, but were also able to generate "falsities" of hereditary evil (A.1573, 1563). These the Lord felt as imaginations and potential reasonings of His own mind. Even though He never accepted them as His Own they must have had a physical basis as disorders even in the organics of the cortical substances and in the course and constitution of the "purer blood". (See An.Spir. 19, R.Psych. 117, 120, 121, Fibre 373, 525.) The "animus" is a plan which is formed by reactions with the sensual. .

The maternal heredity is defined as natural, bodily, and material. It produces observable mental characteristics of which evil is predicable. (Cf R. Psych. 424.) Evils and other mental inclinations cannot be predicated of material substance, and no spiritual substance comes from the mother.

To meet this problem it seems necessary to conceive that the soul, inflowing into the inherited maternal chromosomes, has to act according to reception and take on the form of the maternal mind. For ,as it is known, the spiritual forms itself in the natural.

This is easily imagined in the case of man. His "soul" or spiritual which is from the father is already pervert as to the one degree which can be affected by maternal heredity, vi_. , the spiritual-natural degree. (W. 345, 432.) But in the case of the Lord, His Soul was Divine and infinite, and could not so be qualified.

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Yet it is known that the Lord, like all men, possessed a human mind, which was gradually informed by truths and goods from the Word. He could not have been tempted unless His mind had been finite. This finite mind, like man's, must have ranged through all the degrees of the spiritual world, yet it was not taken from the angels nor from the substance of a finite father, nor was it affected from within by anything finite corresponding to paternal heredity or by any inherited evils. Furthermore, it was not limited as "celestial" or "spiritual" in genius, as is the case with man; but the Lord alone was "born celestial -spiritual".

Only two alternatives present themselves:

A. The first would be to suppose that the Mary-human itself had an inherent and separate "soul" still indwelling in the transmitted chromosomes. Such a theory could hardly commend itself, since it appears without any basis in doctrine. It would in fact bring us back to the idea of orthodox Christians that the rational soul was derived from Mary, making Christ a "perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting" contrary to the "traducian" idea of Aristotle. (See Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, 1863, vol. i- 2P. 399-406.)

B. The other alternative is to assume that the Lord, in becoming incarnate, descended into ultimates by clothing His Divine paternal Seed (which was infinite and uncreate, Canons, Trin., iv. 5) with finite substances of His own creation and taken from all the degrees of the spiritual world. These substances existed in Divine order, forming finite but orderly planes in which His future finite mind was to be formed.

Such a supposition would explain much that is said of the glorification process, especially concerning the "Joseph" plane, which is described as "the celestial of the spiritual", or truth from the Divine ,or as "that internal Human of the Lord" which "before it was fully glorified" was "a recipient of the Divine Itself" (A. 5417). This the Lord was while He lived in the world (A.5307). This is "the good of truth in which is the Divine"... This the Lord alone had when He was in the world and it was the Human in which the Divine Itself could be and which could be put off when the Lord had made all the Human in Himself Divine"(A.5331). It was "put off", not because it came from Mary (for it did not) but because it was finite and thus liable to appearences. It certainly was not evil, nor material, nor Divine. But it must have been spiritual and finite. We might tentatively conceive of it as the inmost of the Rational.

Finite spiritual substances had thus to be assumed to veil the Divine Seed and to serve as the structure of the Lord's developing finite mind. Without them, how could there have been any human memory to be stored with knowledge, or any Rational to think finite human thoughts? Put with such spiritual substances organized into a mind, the Lord could become a subject that could be affected from without by the evil spheres of devils and satans whose influx was invited by the correspondent sensual organics of the maternal human inheritance. By possessing a human mind substantially organized, the Lord could feel the influxes of the hells and heavens as part of His own finite human consciousness while He was in the world.

278 AC 313,3469:3.

279 AC 2300f; WE 1048.

280 CL 202.

281 AC 3304. VVhy, of SD min.4635-36.

282 AC 3599,3603:5.

283 AC 3469, enum.

284 AC 3469, cf WE 1053,1056,1060.

285 Refs to AC, in HD 83.

286 AE 543:4; DLW 270.

287 287 CL 444:4,525; DP 277; AC 313.

288 AC 2122.

289 AC 4317:4-6,313,494,2910,3469,8550,4171,10134:3; DP 328:7.

290 DP 215 :7, 277; AC 3701, 1906.

291 AC 2307f. 8550.

292 AC 10318, 10791, des. DP 83, 183.

293 AC 2300; TCR 521.

294 DP 328 :8, 9, 10, to 329, 330.

295 AC 828; SD 2710. Comp. WE 5675.

296 AC 3963e, 5032 et al., cf AC 4317, 3469.

297 AC 1033; DP 14, cf 277 4.

298 SD 2622-23, cf HH 293; AC 8227 2; SD 1946, et al.

299 AC 1902; SD min. 4635f.

300 AC 4644, 1573, 1438: 2, 4963.

301 AC 1573, 1414 (cf 1444), 4317, 4564; DP 79 :2

302 TCR 103, 521 :3, AC 313; DLW 2G9e.

303 TCR 103.

304 AC 4317 :4 see CL 202-20s; SD 6055.

305 Canons, Rdr, ix.2.

306 AC 1815, 3518, 4963 :3, Ath.Cr. 216, cf WE 1048.

307 AC 3518.

308 AC 1414 (cf 1444), 4317, 3518.

309 Cf WE 1057, 5332e.

310 WE 5332e; R.Psych. 424.

311 TCR 103, 112 :5; AC 1815.

312 TCR 92.

313 AC 5689 :3, 6716:2; DP 277; De Dom. 21; Ath. cr. 215.

314 D. Wis. iii. 2 expl.

315 Ath. cr. 216.

316 AC 4317 4, cf TCR 103. see Rational Psychology, n. 424, and WE 1057, 1059, 19991. Male ancestors, cf DLW 269.

317 DP 277

318 Cf AC 2300f, WE 1048.

319 CL 220; R. Psych. 424. (Male ancestors, cf DLW 269). CL 206; TCR 103.

320 TCR 103; AC 6716 2; TCR 521; CL 202.

321 DP 277; AC 2603; CL 227,246; WE 1059.

322 AC 1921.

323 AC 3078:2, 4317 5

324 AC s342 :2.

325 AC 8550.

326 CL 202ff; AC 3469, cp WE 1060.

327 DLW 269e, cf CL 203; AC 3318: 2.

328 DLW 68.

329 SD 1311

330 DP 277, cf Canons, Redr. ix. 2; CL 202, 205.78

331 AC4563.

332 AE 989, 521; AC 45G3; HH 509e, cf 342, ill.

333 HH 342. Cf Deut. xxiv. 16, Ezek. xviii.

334 CL 202, art.

335 AC 3470-71, 3508, 3518 2, 7761. ( Contrasted with spiritual good, AC 4988 2. 5032: 2, 6208).