The sperm-drop
object · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
النطفة · nuṭfah · the sperm-drop · صورة النطفة
in the texts
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The sperm-drop whose fourth month marks the moment of ensoulment.
the sound position, which Law and reason support, is that it is created together with the bodies, and that the angel breathes the spirit — that is, brings it to be by the breathing — into the body when four months have passed over the sperm-drop and it has entered upon the fifth.
Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
The nuṭfah, whose matter must subsist while humanity passes from potency into act, and whose form perishes at that moment, supplying the model by which perishing is restricted to what inheres in a subsisting locus.
So when its ceasing to be comes forth into act, the locus is subsisting together with that ceasing to be — as with the form of the sperm-drop, which ceases to be from its matter while that matter, together with its ceasing to be, is existent.
And the form of the sperm-drop (*nuṭfah*), since it was not subsisting at the time of the coming forth of the human form into act, the human form was not in that form potentially;