138 ROSICRUCIANCOSMO-CONCEPTION
quality and quantity of the matter which is to be built into
that dense body. Although at the present stage of
development there is never full harmony in the materials of
the body, because that would mean a perfect body, yet the
discord must not be so great as to be disruptive of the
organism.
Thus while heredity in the first place is true only as
regards the material of the dense body and not the soul
qualities, which are entirely individual, the incoming Ego
also does a certain amount of work on its dense body,
incorporating in it the quintessence of its past physical
qualities. No body is an exact mixture of the qualities of its
parents, although the Ego is restricted to the use of the
materials taken from the bodies of the father and mother.
Hence a musician incarnates where he can get the material
to build the slender hand and the delicate ear, with its
sensitive fibers of Corti and its accurate adjustment of the
three semicircular canals. The arrangement of these
materials, however, is, to the extent named, under the
control of the Ego. It is as though a carpenter were given a
pile of boards to use in building a house in which to live, but
is left to his own judgment as to the kind of house he wishes
to build.
Except in the case of a very highly developed being, this
work of the Ego is almost negligible at the present stage of
man's evolution. The greatest scope is given in the building
of the desire body, very little in that of the vital body and
almost none in the dense body; yet even this little is
sufficient to make each individual an expression of his own
spirit and different from the parents.
When the impregnation of the ovum has taken place, the
desire body of the mother works upon it for a period of from