Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

4Is the work, then, impossible? Not that either. In that case matter would be so unfit for the work that it could never be brought to the work’s form and completion. If, considered with respect to matter, the work to be done is neither necessary nor impossible, it remains possible; possibility is the middle between those two extremes.

5By ‘possible’ I mean able both to be and not to be. For if matter’s nature made only being possible, the work would unquestionably be necessary; if that same nature made only nonbeing possible, the work would be impossible. Since, therefore, the nature of matter leaves the work equally able to be and not to be, matter itself, with respect to the making of the work, clearly contains a potentiality both for being and for nonbeing. Since matter is simple and not composed of several natures, one and the same nature of matter is the potentiality both to be and not to be.

6Because matter is indifferent to either outcome and does not of itself come to rest in one rather than the other, it needs a higher agent to form it and determine it toward being. From that agent it receives the form of a lion and so becomes a lion. The lion’s matter, which previously contained a potentiality both to be and not to be a lion, is now determined to being one. But does that same potentiality, indifferent to either outcome, still remain in prime matter? If it did not, the nature of matter would immediately cease; nothing could be made from matter or consist of it if prime matter lost its own nature and perished the instant something came to be. Thus, when the lion has been generated, that same specific potentiality remains—not in the secondary matter proximate to the lion, but in prime matter: the potentiality, I mean, both to be and not to be. It follows that, just as through that potentiality the lion once began to be when previously it was not, so through the same potentiality it will at some time cease to be after having been.