And we ought, in this connection, to bear in mind as a certain and true fact that the growth-giving power, although it has been found, from the standpoint that we have mentioned, to be following close upon the nutritive, and the propagating (generating) to be following close upon the growth-imparting (promoting), yet the precedence of the part played by each one of the three, in their undertaking the task of creating the living body and preserving it through their special and peculiar workings, is the other way about; for the first to enthrall the material predisposed to receive life is the generating (procreating, propagating) power, since this power clothes the material at first with the form (prototype) of that which is intended to be realized through the ministry (service) of the growth-promoting and nutritive powers; and as soon as it has achieved in that material a perfect form it delivers over the sway to the growth-promoting power, which assumes it through the ministry (service) of the nutritive power, and imparts to the material--all the time keeping up the form of the material within the due proportions of the [three] dimensions [length, breadth and thickness]--a motion (activity) of growth towards the end striven after by it, the growth-promoting power aforesaid. Then this latter stops; and the nutritive power enthralls the material. Again, the generating (propagating) power is the one served, not the servant; and in comparison with it, the nutritive power is the servant, not the one served. Thus too the growth-promoting power is served in one sense, and serving in an other sense. And the nutritive power, although it does not exist as the one served in the spiritual powers, yet it does sometimes employ the four forces of Nature--to wit, the attracting, the holding, the digesting, and the excreting (repelling). And, even as that which is striven after in the process of form-making is solely the bringing about of the [due] form in matter in the shape (kind, design) proposed, and not at all the bringing about of growth or of nutrition,--only that there is need for the two latter for the sake of realizing the desired form, and not the converse--so also the final aim in the [several] powers is the procreating (propagating) power, to the exclusion of the growth-promoting and of the nutritive. Wherefore, the procreating power is given precedence for a teliological reason. And through God is fitness to be achieved. FOOTNOTES: [11] Probably his view was that worms arise out of a germ of moist clay or mud, and are a sort of developed protoplasm. Compare §6 of Ibn Tufayl’s «Hayy b. Yaqzân,» and the Note thereto in the English Translation about field-rats. [F] The germ of the Doctrine of Evolution as against Instantaneous Creation.