that logically implies an
ultimate attenuating diffusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, it
is held that "the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all the
vital fluids of Eve; and this corruption carried vicious and
chaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of all
her posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing."6
This form is as incredible as the other; for it equally implies a
limitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. As Whewell
says, "This successive inclusion of germs (Einschachtelungs
Theorie) implies that each soul contains an infinite number of
germs."7 It necessarily excludes the formation of new spiritual
substance: else original transmitted sin is excluded. The doctrine
finds no parallelism anywhere else in nature. Who, no matter how
wedded to the theology of original sin and transmitted death,
would venture to stretch the same thesis over the animal races,
and affirm that the dynamic principles, or animating souls, of all
serpents, eagles, and lions, were once compressed in the first
patriarchal serpent, eagle, or lion?

That the whole formative power of all the simultaneous members of
our race was concentrated in the first cell germ of our original
progenitor, is a scientific impossibility and incredibleness. The
fatal sophistry in the traducian account of the transmission of
souls may be illustrated in the following manner. The germs of all
the apple trees now in existence did not lie in the first apple
seed. All the apple trees now existing were not derived by literal
development out of the actual contents of the first apple seed.
No: but the truth is this. There was a power in the first apple
seed to secure certain conditions; that is, to organize a certain
status in which the plastic vegetative life of nature would posit
new and similar powers and materials. So not all souls were latent
in Adam's, but only an organizing power to secure the conditions
on which the Divine Will that first began, would, in accordance
with His creative plan, forever continue, His spirit creation. The
distinction of this statement from that of traduction is the
difference between evolution from one original germ or stock and
actual production of new beings. Its distinction from the third
theory the theory of immediate creation is the difference between
an intermittent interposition of arbitrary acts and the continuous
working of a plan according to laws scientifically traceable