Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

11The Platonists properly call motion in the soul an action, because it takes place in its own source and both forms and moves the body. Motion in the body, however, they call a passion. And since even the corporeal mass of the universe must be moved by another, they conclude that the motion of the universal body is a passion brought upon it by the motion of the universal soul, as though by an action. Just as in every kind they always refer imperfect things back to perfect ones, so they refer the imperfect motion of body back to the soul's motion as perfect within the very kind of motion.

12Accordingly, when the Platonists are asked by what motion the soul is chiefly moved, they answer: not a corporeal motion, for it is incorporeal; not an imaginable motion, for it has no shape; not a cognitive motion, for it does not know itself; but a motion according to its vital essence. Just as the act of essence is to be, and the act of intellect is to understand, so the act of life is to live. For the soul possesses life not as something adventitious but from itself; and, to use their words, the soul is life generating and producing itself. All life, moreover, is motion. Therefore, if every living thing is moved, what lives of itself also moves of itself; and what lives always is always moved—not, to be sure, by an intellectual motion, but by a vital one. Hence the soul is always moved and not always moved. The mind exists in potency, but life in act. In short, the essence always lives and perpetually exercises motion within itself, since essential life is always mobile; yet the powers and acts that attend both life and intellect can sometimes be interrupted or go astray.