Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Thirteenth argument. The mind is not changed when it receives forms.

1Whenever the form of one body is truly received by another, it makes the receiver altogether such as the body from which the form is imparted. Thus, when a flame of fire is received by wood, it makes the wood hot and fiery. But a flame shining in a mirror at a distance does not make the mirror hot or fiery, because it is not truly received by the mirror, which on account of the distance is not disposed to receive the fire’s real flame. Indeed, that little flame—that is, the image of the flame—being spiritual, is not fixed in the body of the mirror at all, but in the spiritual light of the sun that envelops the mirror’s surface. Images of things of this kind are produced not by the bodies whose images they are—for a body cannot generate anything incorporeal—but by the spiritual light poured around those bodies. Light itself, moreover, is born not from the sun’s globe but from the sun’s soul. The light of that soul, invisible while it remains within, becomes visible when poured farther abroad; and in that light the soul itself also becomes manifest. For, as the Orphics and Heraclitus hold, light is nothing other than visible soul, through which all things revive; the soul, in turn, is invisible light. But lest we wander too far, the forms or images of bodies are not truly in mirrors. The mind, however, receives the forms of all bodies when it judges bodies. Does it receive them truly? Truly indeed. It judges according as it receives; it judges truly, and therefore receives truly. It receives them, I say, from itself, as the Platonists believe: awakened by the images of bodies, it brings into the light forms that lie hidden in the recesses of the mind. Moreover, wherever a form is more perfect, there it is also more true. How much more perfect the form of bodies is in the mind than in bodies themselves we have shown elsewhere and shall show again. This is also evident from the fact that the human nature in Plato or Socrates is proper to Plato alone or to Socrates alone, whereas the human nature conceived by the mind, when it considers the conditions of human beings under one definition of man, applies to every human being, since it embraces them all. Furthermore, if the truth of each thing consists in pure integrity or integral purity, while form in matter does not retain its full power because it is mingled with passivity and surrounded by extraneous accidents, then each thing is found more truly in the mind. There the Idea of the thing, naturally implanted, produces a conception of it that includes everything necessary and wholly excludes what is superfluous. The mind therefore receives the forms of bodies so truly that it possesses them more truly even than bodily matter does.