269. (iv) Such things as have come to be of the love and consequently of the life are engendered in offspring. It is well known that man is born into evil, and that he derives it from parents by heredity. And by some it is believed that he inherits it not from parents, but through parents from Adam; but this is an error. He derives it from the father from whom he has a soul, and it is clothed with a body in the mother. For the seed, which is from the father, is the first receptacle of life, but such a receptacle as it was with the father. For it is in the form of his love, and the love of each man in things greatest and least, is similar to itself and there is in the seed a conatus into the human form, into which indeed it successively goes forth. Hence it follows that the evils called hereditary are from fathers, thus from grandfathers and ancestors successively transmitted to offspring. Experience teaches this same thing for as regards the affections, there is a resemblance of races to their first progenitors, and a stronger resemblance in families, and a still stronger resemblance in households. Indeed such is the resemblance that generations are distinguishable, not only from dispositions, but even from faces. But concerning this ingeneration of the love of evil from parents to offspring more will be said in what follows where the correspondence of the mind, that is of the will and understanding, with the body and its members and organs, is treated of. Here these few things only are brought forward that it may be known that evils are derived from parents successively, and that they increase through the accumulations of one after another, until man by birth is nothing but evil; also that the malignity of the evil increases according to the degree in which the spiritual mind is closed up, for in this way, the natural mind is also closed above. Finally there is no recovery from this in posterity except by shunning evils as sins by help from the Lord. In this and in no other way is the spiritual mind opened, and through it the natural mind is brought back into a correspondent form.