Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

21Quality limps with good reason. At the very moment when it is born, it is scattered through the breadth and depth of matter and plunged, as it were, into the river Lethe. Thus, before it can act at all, it is in a certain fashion overcome by matter, which seems to infect it. Its power therefore never overcomes matter by itself, and so it will never move matter by itself unless strengthened by a higher cause.

22Quality is indeed strengthened and directed by a certain life. This life begets life and sensation even from nonliving mud when frogs and flies are generated. From the one shapeless matter of dung it produces various and exceedingly beautiful flowers through various and exceedingly beautiful seeds; since these seeds are often not found in the dung, they must be present in life itself. Life also gathers scattered matter into order. Order proceeds from reason; reason subsists in life; and life in a certain indivisible power, for death occurs through division and dissolution. Again, life generates fire from the collision of cold bodies. And when the reflection of rays in a mirror, or heated iron through the accidental quality of fire, heats wool, that life, through the vital seeds of fire, produces the substantial form of fire in the wool.

23What, then, do we suppose there is in us? What consumes food not violently, but gently and in ordered fashion cooks and digests it? What so wonderfully reduces nonliving food to living form? What continually carries heavy things upward and light things downward, without manifest violence, beyond—indeed, above—their nature, as the needs of life demand? What reconciles things at war with one another and binds them into one? Certainly not simple fiery heat, no quality belonging to any of the conflicting things, no divisible nature, no bare property of nature, but rather a certain higher, indivisible, life-giving power. Consider the same in the universe as in us.