269. (4) Qualities that have become matters of one's love and consequent life are passed on hereditarily to offspring. People know that a person is born into a state of evil, and that he acquires this state hereditarily from his parents. Some also believe that he acquires it not from his parents, but through his parents from Adam, but this is an erroneous supposition. A person acquires the state from his father, from whom he has his soul, which is clothed with a body in the mother. For the sperm which comes from the father is the first vessel receptive of life-a vessel, however, of such a character as it was in the father, being in the form of his love, and everyone's love in the greatest and least of its forms is the same. The sperm moreover carries within it an endeavor toward the human form, into which it also gradually develops. It follows therefore that evils we call hereditary come from fathers, and so from grandfathers and great-grandfathers, being transmitted in succession from them into their offspring. Experience, too, attests to this. For nations exhibit a likeness in their affections to their earliest progenitor, and even more so clans, and still more individual families. Indeed they exhibit such a likeness that succeeding generations are discerned not only from their dispositions but also from their facial features. [2] On this subject, however, regarding the hereditary transmission of a love of evil from parents into offspring, we will say more in subsequent discussions where we take up the correspondence of the mind or of the will and intellect with the body and its members and organs. We have presented only these few observations here in order to make it known that evils are passed on in succession from parents; that in consequence of the accumulated evils of one generation after another they increase, to the point that a person from birth is nothing but a mass of evil; that the malignity of the evil grows to the degree that the spiritual mind is closed, for the natural mind is then closed above; and that this condition is not restored to its original state in succeeding generations except by their refraining from evils as sins in obedience to the Lord. Thus and no otherwise is the spiritual mind opened and the natural mind thereby brought back into a corresponding form.