396.  As for the souls or substantial forms, M. Bayle is right in adding:  ’that there is nothing more inconvenient for those who admit substantial forms than the objection which is made that they could not be produced save by an actual creation, and that the Schoolmen are pitiable in their endeavours to answer this.’  But there is nothing more convenient for me and for my system than this same objection.  For I maintain that all the Souls, Entelechies or primitive forces, substantial forms, simple substances, or Monads, whatever name one may apply to them, can neither spring up [361] naturally nor perish.  And the qualities or derivative forces, or what are called accidental forms, I take to be modifications of the primitive Entelechy, even as shapes are modifications of matter.  That is why these modifications are perpetually changing, while the simple substance remains.

397.  I have shown already (part I, 86 seqq.) that souls cannot spring up naturally, or be derived from one another, and that it is necessary that ours either be created or be pre-existent.  I have even pointed out a certain middle way between a creation and an entire pre-existence.  I find it appropriate to say that the soul preexisting in the seeds from the beginning of things was only sentient, but that it was elevated to the superior degree, which is that of reason, when the man to whom this soul should belong was conceived, and when the organic body, always accompanying this soul from the beginning, but under many changes, was determined for forming the human body.  I considered also that one might attribute this elevation of the sentient soul (which makes it reach a more sublime degree of being, namely reason) to the extraordinary operation of God.  Nevertheless it will be well to add that I would dispense with miracles in the generating of man, as in that of the other animals.  It will be possible to explain that, if one imagines that in this great number of souls and of animals, or at least of living organic bodies which are in the seeds, those souls alone which are destined to attain one day to human nature contain the reason that shall appear therein one day, and the organic bodies of these souls alone are preformed and predisposed to assume one day the human shape, while the other small animals or seminal living beings, in which no such thing is pre-established, are essentially different from them and possessed only of an inferior nature.  This production is a kind of traduction, but more manageable than that kind which is commonly taught:  it does not derive the soul from a soul, but only the animate from an animate, and it avoids the repeated miracles of a new creation, which would cause a new and pure soul to enter a body that must corrupt it.