Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

12He governs each thing with marvelous ease. He does not work upon alien materials received from elsewhere, but upon materials of his own making. Nor does he touch them only from without; he moves them from within, for he is present in the innermost recesses of all things. He does not labor over a multitude. Through his own being, which is the universal hinge of all things, he turns the hinges that follow it—essence, life, mind, soul, nature, and matter. Or, as a Platonist might say, through the proper hinge of each order he turns that entire order: through one essence, every essence; through one life, all lives; through mind, all minds; through one soul, every soul; through nature, all natures; and through matter, all matters. Nothing resists his decree, for he surpasses everything by an immeasurable interval. Orpheus sang divinely of the divine nature: ‘turning the swift impulse upon an everlasting hinge.’ We know that an animal has a certain sinew near the nape; those who pull it move all the animal's limbs together in such a way that each is moved with its own motion. By a similar drawing, Aristotle writes in On the World that God moves the members of the world. There he affirms providence most openly; he also indicates it in the tenth book of the Ethics and in the Physics, where he proves that Nature everywhere regards a definite and optimal end, and that her works are the works of an intelligence that does not err.

13At Florence we saw a mechanical display made by a German craftsman. In it, figures of different animals were joined and balanced upon a single ball; when the ball moved, they were all set in motion at once, each in a different way. Some ran to the right, others to the left, upward and downward; some rose from their seats, while others bent from a standing position; some crowned their companions, while others wounded them. The sound of trumpets and horns could also be heard, together with the songs of birds.