But, if the human mind or soul is spiritual, it is clear that it cannot be a product of organic evolution, any more than it can be a product of parental generation. On the contrary, each and every human soul must be an immediate creation of the Author of Nature, not evolved from the internal potentiality of matter, but infused into matter from without. The human soul is created in organized matter, but not from it. Nor can the Divine action, in this case, be regarded as a supernatural interposition; for it supplements, rather than supersedes, the natural process of reproduction; and, since it is not in matter to produce spirit, a creative act is demanded by the very nature of things. Evolution is nothing more nor less than a transmutation of matter, and a transmutation of matter cannot terminate in the annihilation of matter and the constitution of non-matter or spirit. If nothing of the _terminus a quo_ persists in the final product, we have substitution, and not transmutation. The evolution of matter, therefore, cannot progress to a point where all materiality is eliminated. Hence, whatever proceeds from matter, either as an emanation or an action, will, of necessity, be material. It should be noted, however, that by material we do not mean corporeal; for material denotes not merely matter itself, but everything that intrinsically depends on matter. The term, therefore, is wider in its sense than corporeal, because it comprises, besides matter, all the properties, energies, and activities of matter. Hence whatever is incapable of existence and activity apart from matter (whether ponderable or imponderable) belongs to the material, as distinguished from the spiritual, order of things. The soul of a brute, for example, is not matter, but it is material, nevertheless, because it is totally dependent on the matter of the organism, apart from which it has neither existence nor activity of its own.