which is called the natural; man alone from all three degrees, called the celestial, spiritual, and natural.  As each degree of height or discrete degree decreases from its perfection to its imperfection, as light to shade, by continuity, so do animals; there are therefore perfect, less perfect, and imperfect animals.  The perfect animals are elephants, camels, horses, mules, oxen, sheep, goats, and others which are of the herd or the flock; the less perfect are birds; and the imperfect are fish and shell-fish; these, as being the lowest of that degree, are as it were in shade, while the former are in light.  Yet animals, since they live only from the lowest spiritual degree, which is called the natural, can look nowhere else than towards the earth and to food there, and to their own kind for the sake of propagation; the soul of all these is natural affection and appetite.  The subjects of the vegetable kingdom comprise, in like manner, the perfect, less perfect, and imperfect; the perfect are fruit trees, the less perfect are vines and shrubs, and the imperfect are grasses.  But plants derive from the spiritual out of which they spring that they are uses, while animals derive from the spiritual out of which they spring that they are affections and appetites, as was shown above.

347. (7) Each of these forms receives with its existence the means of propagation.  In all products of the earth, which pertain, as was said above, either to the vegetable or to the animal kingdom, there is a kind of image of creation, and a kind of image of man, and also a kind of image of the infinite and the eternal; this was shown above (n. 313-318); also that the image of the infinite and the eternal is clearly manifest in the capacity of all these for infinite and eternal propagation.  They all, therefore, receive means of propagation; the subjects of the animal kingdom through seed, in the egg or in the womb or by spawning; and the subjects of the vegetable kingdom through seeds in the ground.  From which it can be seen that although the more imperfect and the noxious animals and plants originate through immediate influx out of hell, yet afterwards they are propagated mediately by seeds, eggs, or grafts; consequently, the one position does not annul the other.

348.  That all uses, both good and evil, are from a spiritual origin, thus from the sun where the Lord is, may be illustrated by this experience.  I have heard that goods and truths have been sent down through the heavens by the Lord to the hells, and that these same, received by degrees to the lowest deep, were there turned into evils and falsities, which are the opposite of the goods and truths sent down.  This took place because recipient subjects turn all things that inflow into such things as are in agreement with their own forms, just as the white light of the sun is turned into ugly colors or into black in those objects whose substances are interiorly of such a form as to suffocate and extinguish the light, and as stagnant ponds, dung-hills, and dead bodies turn the heat of the sun into stenches.  From all this it can be seen that even evil uses are from the spiritual sun, but that good uses are changed in hell into evil uses.  It is evident, therefore, that the Lord has not created and does not create any except good uses, but that hell produces evil uses.