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Femina est mas occasionatus－Aristotle's Effect on the Thomas Aquinas' View of Female Sex－Yong-Gu Cha Thomas Aquinas follow Aristotle in his view that male is ordered to the more noble activity, intellectual knowledge, whereas the female, although possessing a rational soul, was created solely with respect to her sexuality, her body, as an aid in reproduction for the preservation of the species. Thomas also follows Aristotelian biology in his assertion that the girl child represents a defective haman being, the result of an accident to the male sperm, which was thought to contaim the complete human being in potentia and to reproduce by nature the likeness of its origin, that is, another male. This finality of the female as a mere instrumentality, an aid to reproduction, is the only explanation Thomas can offer for the existence of a “second sex”, since for any other activity man would have been better served by a male helpmate. On the other hand, Thomas' View of Female Sex has a positive core: he insisted in theory on a societas amicabilis and equivalence of male and female in the order of salvation. In attempting to reconcile Genesis with Aristotle’s physiology, he came to the conclusion, that original sin wa passed from Adam through the male line to the entire huamn race. Just as there ist no point in branding Thomas misogynist, there is no reason to go to the opposite extreme, to single out certain isolated phenomena as harbingers of feminist sympathies. Ahistorical interpretation is also to be avoided.