Genera and species are not abstractions; they are real, though subsisting never apart from individuals. Their reality is evinced by the process called generation, by which every kind generates its like. The race continues itself, and does not die with the individual. Men die, humanity survives. It is all very well to say with Plato individuals are mimetic, and exist as individuals by participation of the idea, if we assume ideas are genera and species, and created after the models or archetypes in the divine mind; but it will not do to say so when we identify ideas with the divine mind, that is, with God himself: We then make genera and species ideas in God, and since ideas in God are God, we identify them with the divine essence--a doctrine which the Holy See has recently condemned, and which would deny all reality distinguishable from God, and make all existences merely phenomenal, and reduce all the categories, as Cousin does, to being and phenomenon, which is pure pantheism. The _ideae exemplares_, or archetypes of genera and species, after which God creates them, are in the divine mind, but the genera and species, the real universals, are creatures, and as much so as individuals or particulars themselves. They are creatures by the direct creation of God, without the intervention of the plastic soul asserted by Plato, accepted by Cudworth, and, in his posthumous essay on the Methexis and Mimesis, even by Gioberti. {151} God creates all living creatures in genera and species, as the Scripture plainly hints when it says: "And God said, Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after its _kind_, which may have seed in itself upon the earth." Not only in the vegetable but also in the animal world, each living creature brings forth its kind--a fact without which generation would be unintelligible, and which our scientific men who dream of the formation of species by natural selection, and are laboring hard to prove that man has been developed from the tadpole or monkey, would do well to remember.