uld seem
to produce other infected souls. Others, rejecting this as erroneous,
endeavored to show how the guilt of the parent's soul can be
transmitted to the children, even though the soul be not transmitted,
from the fact that defects of the body are transmitted from parent to
child--thus a leper may beget a leper, or a gouty man may be the
father of a gouty son, on account of some seminal corruption,
although this corruption is not leprosy or gout. Now since the body
is proportionate to the soul, and since the soul's defects redound
into the body, and vice versa, in like manner, say they, a culpable
defect of the soul is passed on to the child, through the
transmission of the semen, albeit the semen itself is not the subject
of the guilt.

But all these explanations are insufficient. Because, granted that
some bodily defects are transmitted by way of origin from parent to
child, and granted that even some defects of the soul are transmitted
in consequence, on account of a defect in the bodily habit, as in the
case of idiots begetting idiots; nevertheless the fact of having a
defect by the way of origin seems to exclude the notion of guilt,
which is essentially something voluntary. Wherefore granted that the
rational soul were transmitted, from the very fact that the stain on
the child's soul is not in its will, it would cease to be a guilty
stain binding its subject to punishment; for, as the Philosopher says
(Ethic. iii, 5), "no one reproaches a man born blind; one rather
takes pity on him."

Therefore we must explain the matter otherwise by saying that all men
born of Adam may be considered as one man, inasmuch as they have one
common nature, which they receive from their first parents; even as
in civil matters, all who are members of one community are reputed as
one body, and the whole community as one man. Indeed Porphyry says
(Praedic., De Specie) that "by sharing the same species, many men are
one man." Accordingly the multitude of men born of Adam, are as so
many members of one body. Now the action of one member of the body,
of the hand for instance, is voluntary not by the will of that hand,
but by the will of the soul, the first mover of the members.
Wherefore a murder which the hand commits would not be imputed as a
sin to the hand, considered by itself as apart from the body, but is
imputed to it as something belonging to man and moved by man's first
moving principle. In this way, then, the disorder whi