Note 246 — Chapter VII
Hugh J. C. Beavan translation
Words borrowed from the definition of species by Isidore Geoffroy, Histoire Naturelle Générale, vol. ii, p. 437. “The act which appears most natural to living beings who are perfect, and who are not abortive, nor produced by spontaneous generation, is the production of a being like themselves, the animal producing an animal, the plant a plant, so as to participate in the eternal and divine nature as much as they can.”—De l’âme, book ii, chap. iv, § 2, transl. by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire.