ANIMATION. - I. WHAT BIOLOGY SAYS. - The philosophical and theological problem of animation, that is, the identification of the moment at which the rational soul is infused into the body, and the debate still raging between a concept of immediate animation, that is, at the very act of conception, and a concept of mediate or delayed animation, at much later stages of development, must find their presuppositions in the facts of biology. It is the biologist's task to supply these facts; their interpretation belongs to the philosopher and the theologian. It is quite clear that the biologist, who studies the manifestations of life and biological phenomena scientifically and experimentally only in their material aspect, insofar as that alone is perceptible to our senses and that alone is measurable (spatial, ponderal and temporal measurements), cannot experimentally confront the problem of the soul, even if, for the vitalist biologist, it is always taken into account in the phenomena of reactivity, adaptation and regulation.
For the biologist the problem of the soul is identified, in certain respects, with the problem of individuality.
The supporters of immediate animation of the most modern school, contrary to the conception of delayed animation, after a more or less advanced development or after birth, admit that individuality, and therefore the soul, is established in the fertilized egg. Now embryology shows us how the individuality of the fertilized egg is by no means something irrevocably established. It is possible to divide the segmented egg at its first two cells or even at more advanced stages, by tightening a noose made of a very fine thread (experiments on amphibians), into two parts: each part gives a complete embryo, and the egg that was to give a single individual gives two individuals (Spemann, Herlitzka, etc.).
In other animals, such as echinoderms and jellyfish, it is possible to free the various cells of a germ at the morula stage: each cell that would have been, without intervention, a fourth, an eighth, a sixteenth, or a thirty-second of an individual, becomes a complete individual, though, owing to the deficiency of material, of smaller dimensions (Driesch, Zoja, etc.). This phenomenon can also occur naturally and, in many cases, is the normal condition. It is the phenomenon of polyembryony, that is, the development of many embryos from a single egg. In certain hymenopterans thousands of individuals are born from a single egg (Silvestri). Even in the human species it is not a rare phenomenon: these are the cases of monochorial twinning, that is, of fetuses contained in a single chorion and nourished by a single placenta; they derive from a single egg that, for unspecified causes, at a certain stage divided. Bigemini are common, but trigemini, quadrigemini and quintuplets are also known. They are siblings all of the same sex and resemble one another in a most remarkable way, often even in the smallest details (fingerprints, etc.).
But perhaps more striking is the case of fusion of eggs. It has been possible to fuse (Mongold and Seidel) a germ of Triton alpestris with a germ of Triton taeniatus, and a single individual developed, a chimera of two species, which, coming from two fertilized eggs, had two fathers and two mothers.
In embryology the problem of individuality is connected with the concept of potency, a finalistic concept, which indicates the future possibility of development. The egg, it is said, is totipotent; that is, it has entirely the potentiality of giving a whole individual. When the egg divides into its first two cells, they are theoretically still totipotent, and indeed, if they are separated, they actualize this totipotency by giving rise to two individuals, but in effect, if experiment does not intervene, their real potency is less than the total one, since they give only half an individual. Why this limitation, just as the total potencies of two fused eggs are limited? For the safeguarding of individuality: the two blastomeres of an egg or the two experimentally fused eggs inhibit each other, and from this reciprocal inhibition is born the harmony of an individuality. Once the blastomeres of an egg are freed, the reciprocal inhibitions are eliminated, and the totipotencies of the individual cells are brought into play. If the isolation of the cells is carried out at more advanced stages, these can no longer regulate themselves and give new complete individualities. With development the cells lose the material possibility of actualizing their totipotency which, theoretically, is still contained in them, probably, according to the concepts of cytogenetics, in their nucleus.
The concept of reciprocal inhibition also refers to the phenomenon of fertilization. The fertilized egg, the first cell of the new being, is it not perhaps made by the fusion of two cells, the female one, the egg, and the male one, the spermatozoon?
Do egg and spermatozoon, before their union, also have their totipotency? The phenomena of the parthenogenesis, that is, the development of a virgin egg, answer us affirmatively. In many animals the development of eggs without the intervention of the male is a natural thing; indeed, for certain species the males are not even known (certain races of Artemia salina). The egg is activated by other factors of a chemical or physical nature. Experimental parthenogenesis has been widely practiced, and by now we have even arrived at producing parthenogenetic animals among mammals (rabbits). Theoretically it is a general phenomenon. Therefore fertilization is not necessary for the arising of an individuality.
The problem of reproduction and of individuality presents other aspects of extreme interest which demonstrate how it is not limited to egg cells but how, theoretically, it must be referred to all the cells of an organism. There are animals, such as freshwater hydras (coelenterates), which, besides by fertilized eggs, reproduce agamically, that is, apart from eggs and spermatozoa or gametes: any group of cells of the body enters into reproductive activity, a bud is formed, and from this a new hydra is born. In all the cells of the body, therefore, there is totipotency, the idea of the biological unity, of the higher individuality. In the lower forms, where the modest differentiation is not an obstacle, such totipotency can be put into action. In the higher, more differentiated forms, such totipotency can manifest itself only up to a certain stage: then the organic and histological differentiation comes to constitute an insuperable obstacle to the putting into action of the totipotency inherent in the protoplasm of every single cell of the organism. But where the concept of individuality becomes notori-
ly complicated is in the possibility of the development of teratological, monstrous forms, where almost, we might say, individuality becomes bifid. The Siamese twins are well known: two individuals joined more or less extensively, generally, in the human species, in the region of the pelvis. The two individualities, though united, are evident. But the fusion can be much more extensive: two-headed monsters are an example. Cases are known in which one head remains awake and smiles while the other sleeps. And thus two psychological individualities are clearly manifested through the behavior and the expression of the two faces. The problem of the soul here faces a question: is the soul localized in the head? Some physiological experiments carried out on dogs, of which the film documentation has been recovered, demonstrate, by circulating blood with an artificial heart through an isolated head, how the activity of that head is maintained and how the head manifests evident psychic conditions, gnashing its teeth if provoked, savoring tasty substances, recognizing the call and the sight of its master. The isolated head could be kept alive for several days.
There are finally monstrosities in which the two heads fuse more or less together into a single body in which, however, the duplicity is detectable.
These conditions of psychological duplicity in a single body, provided the heads are divided, or of the psychic activity of an isolated head, lead us to find in the head the organ of which the rational soul makes use for its most specific manifestations. The amputation of the most varied parts of the body does not in fact compromise the rational personality of man, nor do amputations and lesions of various parts of the head and of the brain itself. A comparative study of the brain between man and the other vertebrates demonstrates how in the human brain there are parts that are missing in the other forms: the specific convolutions of the neocortex. This would be the instrument necessary for the soul to elaborate reasonings during life, and it would be this nervous apparatus that allows man the highest expressions of his consciousness. Lesions of these cerebral zones erase every apparent consciousness of man. The body hosts this material receptacle of the spirit; it is its well-being that determines the well-being of the spirit, and the psychic manifestation is thus influenced by it, as it is influenced by the external conditions of the environment that act upon the body.
Science has neither the means nor the possibility of experimenting upon and analyzing the rational soul, which is immaterial; it can only identify the moment in which it manifests itself with the first psychic phenomena of the child, but it is incapable of saying whether it already resides in the body before its manifestation. It is nevertheless able to ascertain how the first psychic manifestations appear with the accomplished myelination of the nervous pathways, that is, when the specific nervous differentiation (v.) is completely realized, permitting, with the myelinic sheathing of the fibers, that nervous conduction which allows the perception of the sensible world, the accumulation of experiences and, on the basis of these, the external manifestation of a conscious psychic behavior. This differentiative process, however, occurs after the birth of the child and is completed several months later. Science brings to our attention facts that must be considered in the evaluation of the problem, but it is certainly not capable of resolving it: they demonstrate only how in the study of life not everything can be investigated and resolved with a method that is applicable only to matter.
Bibliography3 works
Alberto Stefanelli
2. WHAT PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY SAY
All philosophers agree in admitting that, from the moment of fertilization, the new being that derives from it possesses a soul. When, in the human species, one speaks of immediate or mediate animation, one simply wishes to indicate the question - which is still unresolved - whether that soul is already the rational, definitive one; or rather a transient soul, whose task would consist in predisposing the organization of matter, that is, the histological-anatomical differentiation of the body, until rendering it fit to be informed by the rational soul.
Here indeed lies the point under discussion.
1. For the supporters of mediate animation, the fertilized human egg does not yet possess (as likewise many subsequent stages) that bodily organization (matter) that characterizes the human being; it is therefore not proportioned to be immediately vivified by a soul (form) as elevated as the rational soul. And the decline, in science, of the preformist theory, and the subsequent affirmation of the epigenetic one, proves exhaustively how elementary the organization of the egg still is. Moreover it would be erroneous to assert that the rational soul can construct the body it must inform, that is, be the efficient cause of its organization; since the formal principle presupposes the subject to be actualized, and communicates its reality to it only when it is sufficiently predisposed to receive it. It is clear that such a predisposition must be conferred upon it by an efficient cause that is different from the formal one. Consequently, the adherents of the hypothesis of mediate animation maintain a succession of forms (non-rational souls) ever more elevated, during the ontogenetic processes, which would prepare the matter to receive the supreme form, the rational soul. How many these provisional forms are, when they are replaced by the definitive one, no one can determine with precision and certainty.
The other hypothesis - that of immediate animation - is perhaps today the most universally upheld by philosophers and by those biologists who take an interest in such problems. All admit the structural simplicity of the fertilized egg: but, notwithstanding this, they hold that it already represents a man, indeed that determined individual, and that therefore the matter is already sufficiently predisposed to receive the infusion of the rational soul which confers upon it, all together, being body, vegetative, sensitive, intellective. And they too find, in genetics, scientific data of great value in support of their affirmation. It suffices to mention the doctrine of the genotype, according to which in the chromosomes of the fertilized egg is enclosed the entire hereditary patrimony (generic, specific, individual) of the organism that will derive from it after a more or less long series of transformations. The external environment may influence even profoundly the external manifestation of individual characteristics; these indeed will always be the result of the interaction between the genotype and its environment; but nothing in the end will be produced that is not in some way contained in the hereditary patrimony already detectable in the fertilized egg. In the interaction of the genotype with the environment, the initiative will always belong to the former, which, if it does not find favorable conditions, will adapt in its development, will even sacrifice some less essential characteristic; but it will tend irresistibly to become that individual which is determined by the gene complex.
Moreover all the marvelous transformations that lead from the fertilized egg to the perfect organism demonstrate a mutual bond and an orientation so precise that it seems hardly explicable without admitting a single substantial form from the first to the last stage of development.
It is true that in many embryonic stages the rational soul does not yet find the matter suited to the exercise of some of its functions; but it is not required that it be able to exercise all of them from the very beginning; it seems sufficient that it can carry out some of the most fundamental ones, such as, for example, the vegetative one (which, even in the embryo, is characteristically human). If, however, for the infusion of the rational soul, one were to demand a corporeal organization so advanced as to allow the soul its most specific function - intellectual cognition - then one would have to say that the rational soul is infused into the body only a long time after birth; which is foreign to the mind of the very proponents of mediate animation. Moreover, Innocent XI condemned the opinion which holds it probable that the rational soul is infused only at birth (Denz-U., n. 1185).
2. In the more or less gravely teratological cases - some of which were touched upon just now in the first part of the article - philosophy has little to add to what has already been said. It is the scientist's task to decide when there are two individuals or only one, and at what precise moment one becomes two or more. The proponents of immediate animation will then explain that at that instant there is an infusion of as many new rational souls as there are new individuals being formed; those of mediate animation will admit the same infusion at successive stages. When, on the other hand, from two individuals only one is formed, the proponents of immediate animation will be forced to explain that one dies and its matter is vivified by the substantial form of the other (whichever it may be, it is for science to define it); whereas those who advocate mediate animation will resort to this solution only when the unification of the two individuals is posterior to the stage at which they admit the infusion of the rational soul.
3. The Catholic is perfectly free to accept the hypothesis that pleases him most. For its part, the Church considers as guilty of the crime of abortion all those who procure the expulsion of the human embryo, at whatever stage of development it may be; but by this it does not intend to define theoretically the age-old problem. Since the «dubium facti» persists as to whether or not the human embryo is vivified by the rational soul from the beginning, whoever procures its expulsion hypothetically accepts the responsibility of a true homicide; and as such is struck by ecclesiastical law. The same consideration applies to the disposition by which the Church prescribes that every abortive fetus or monstrous product be baptized: it concerns the eternal salvation of a possible man for whom baptism is necessary «necessitate medii»; and in this case one must practically adhere to the safest course.