3. In the case of twin birth among human beings how can we make out the Reason-Principles to be different; and still more when we turn to the animals and especially those with litters?
Where the young are precisely alike, there is one Reason-Principle.
But this would mean that after all there are not as many Reason Principles as separate beings?
As many as there are of differing beings, differing by something more than a mere failure in complete reproduction of their Idea.
And why may not this [sharing of archetype] occur also in beings untouched by differentiation, if indeed there be any such?
A craftsman even in constructing an object identical with a model must envisage that identity in a mental differentiation enabling him to make a second thing by bringing in some difference side by side with the identity: similarly in nature, where the thing comes about not by reasoning but in sole virtue of Reason-Principles, that differentiation must be included in the archetypal idea, though it is not in our power to perceive the difference.
The consideration of Quantity brings the same result:
If production is undetermined in regard to Quantity, each thing has its distinct Reason-Principle: if there is a measured system the Quantity has been determined by the unrolling and unfolding of the Reason-Principles of all the existences.
Thus when the universe has reached its term, there will be a fresh beginning, since the entire Quantity which the Kosmos is to exhibit, every item that is to emerge in its course, all is laid up from the first in the Being that contains the Reason-Principles.
Are we, then, looking to the brute realm, to hold that there are as many Reason-Principles as distinct creatures born in a litter?
Why not? There is nothing alarming about such limitlessness in generative forces and in Reason-Principles, when Soul is there to sustain all.
As in Soul [principle of Life] so in Divine Mind [principle of Idea] there is this infinitude of recurring generative powers; the Beings there are unfailing.