Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

6Leave behind the confinement of this shadow, then, and return into yourself. In doing so you return to open space. Know that in spirit there is immeasurable breadth, but in body an infinite narrowness, if I may speak so. This can be seen from number. Numbers approach spiritual nature: they have no position, yet according to form they measure and number both incorporeal and corporeal things. They are nothing other than repetitions of unity itself; and unity is incorporeal, because everything corporeal is multiple. Numbers, I say, are spiritual: they increase without end, but do not decrease without end. Magnitude, by contrast, has a limit to its increase, though no limit to its decrease.

7Why, unhappy souls, do you set so great a value on the judgment of the senses, when false images deceive them so thoroughly? Sight judges the sun, which is far larger than the earth, to be scarcely two cubits wide; it judges the swiftly revolving heavens to stand still; it sees a straight oar in water as bent and crooked, and the shore as running while the ship itself moves. Hearing often reports that a voice comes from somewhere other than its source. Taste repeatedly calls sweet things bitter, and commits countless errors of the same kind. Who corrects the errors of the senses? Reason. What amends and perfects is nobler than what is perfected. Reason is therefore more discerning and more truthful than sense.