[Dicta de arbore quae dicitur Imago hominis]

the signification which it carries in itself. So the rational soul is not for its own sake, but for the sake of the beatitude of eternal life, which the abounding grace of the Lord has poured into it. Likewise, just as a sound and a voice relate to an oration, although they can be known specifically, so the vegetative and sensitive soul relate to the rational, although they might vivify other creatures separately. Now it is necessary to proceed to the first root of this tree, namely, the vegetative soul. ¶ Second Image.

A large, ornate decorative initial letter 'V' beginning the word 'Virtus'. The letter is decorated with internal scrolling floral motifs and set within a square frame containing geometric line-work.

The vegetative virtue is called soul as long as it is in plants, and it is a power of the sensitive and rational soul. In the consideration of this power, one must recall the miserable fall of original sin. For how noble the vegetative soul was with its powers, which in all its vegetables expressed the languor of nature, but sin did not drag it down, because it did not consent to the enemies. Its generation was then fragrant and flowering, its fruit large, useful, and delicate. Its nutritive power was subject to the law of nature, inclined to moist and dry. Its augmentative power delighted in the variety of flowers, herbs, and foliage. O foul and languid vegetative power in all flesh, and especially in the rational soul! Whose generative power is the shame of all the senses, the enemy of which sight detests, smell mocks, hearing flees, touch abhors; memory wastes away while it recalls the man conceived in the matrix, just as it remembers the abortion. Whose nutritive power, insatiable, not extended by the law of nature, we delight in more than intent on the nutritive, a devastator of itself. Whence Gregory in the Morals: "The mouth is sweetened, whence the life of the provider is killed." O augmentative, defective, both in children and in adults, which because of the fault of Adam became morbid and diminished through the flood of Noah. And so from day to day it decreases. O, in what poor and miserable movements we are, awaiting the end, let us strive that as much as it decreases in us, the premium of the fatherland may increase in this time of exile, so that when the flower of old age is cut off by inevitable death, we may pass into eternal beatitude.