seed was regarded as a by-product of digestion, rather than as part of the living substance of the parent. 27
Since the schoolmen believed the seminal fluid to be without life, in their view the causality of the male principle in disposing the materials furnished by the mother to the organized pattern required for the induction and functioning of a vital principle, was not a vital but a physical compounding activity. There was no immanent life present in the human embryo prior to the induction of the soul. The body must first attain to proper organization before it could become a potential receptacle of the soul. 28 Such was their biological theory of mediate animation. Scotus, too, demanded a time interval.
When the medieval biological views we have just recalled are found conjoined, as in the case of the followers of St. Augustine, with theories of a physically corrupted human nature and a transmission of original sin through the instrumentality of its infected seed, a satisfactory explanation of preservation from original sin, as implied in the privilege of the Immaculate Conception, will offer special difficulties and demand postulates which Scotus does not have to face by reason of his purely moral deordination theory of original sin.
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