We have used the Greek terms _methexis_ and _mimesis_ after Plato, as Gioberti has done in his posthumous works, but not precisely in Gioberti's sense. Gioberti identifies the methexis with the plastic soul asserted by Plato, and revived by old Ralph Cudworth, an Anglican divine of the seventeenth century; but though we make the methexis causative in the order of second causes, we do not make it productive of the mimesis. It means what are called genera and species; but even in the order of second causes, genera are generative or productive only as specificated, and species only as individualized. God must have created the genus specificated and the species individualized before either could be active or productive as second cause. The genus does not and cannot exist without specification, nor the species without individualization, any more than the individual can exist without the species, or the species without the genus. For instance, man is the species, according to the schoolmen, the genus is animal, the _differentia_ is reason, and hence man is defined a rational animal. But the genus animal, though necessary to its existence, cannot generate the species man, any more than it could have generated itself. The species can exist only as immediately individuated by the first cause, and hence the pretence of some scientists--more properly sciolists,--that new species are formed either by development or by natural selection, is simply absurd, as has been well shown by the Duke of Argyll. God creates the species as well as the genera; and it is fairly inferred from the Scriptures that he creates all things in their genera and species "after their kind." Furthermore, if God had not created the human species individualized in Adam, male and female, there could have been no men by natural generation, any more than if there had been no human species at all.