Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

2If you ask the natural power what the soul is, it will answer without hesitation that the soul is a body, for that power touches nothing but body. If you ask outward sense, it will give the same answer. The eyes will ascribe a shape and color to the soul; the ears a voice; smell an odor; taste a flavor; and touch weight, solidity, heat, and qualities of that kind. If you question inward sense, which feeds upon the vestiges left by the outward senses, it too will paint the soul with images of bodies, for it has nothing else at hand. Our unhappy youth, nourished under these ignorant teachers, compels us to think foolishly about the soul throughout our lives. We suppose it corporeal because we learned from masters who perceive only corporeal things. This error seems especially to have arisen—or rather, to have been confirmed—in another way. If we ever dismiss these three teachers altogether as sophists and take refuge in the mind, that mistress of wisdom, asking it what the soul is, it answers that the soul is such as the mind itself sees it. But alas, what does the mind see? How foul a soul, how pitiable! Certainly not the soul as it was when it descended from heaven. The mind sees the soul's natural power, the fashioner of the body, stained by the corruption of the four humors in which it is submerged and smothered by the fat of the members. It sees the outward senses bending everywhere toward bodies, acting through the body and in some fashion being acted upon by bodies. It sees also the inward sense they call imagination, covered with the forms and qualities of diverse bodies, as though these had been drawn in through the senses. Thus, when the mind beholds the soul wrapped in a bodily garment and observes its appetite inclining toward bodies, it naturally answers that the soul is corporeal. It is just as if a boy had been smeared with mud at birth and encased on every side in an earthen crust throughout his childhood. If someone later asked him, ‘What is your little body like, child?’ would he not answer that it was made of clay? Wash the body, child; clear the clods from your flesh. You will see that you are flesh, not clay.