Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

2Draw the conclusion in another way. The soul is either a solid body or a fluid one. If it is solid, it can scarcely be impressed by bodies, and its capacity to learn and its keenness are lost. Once it has received the figure of one thing, it either cannot receive others or, if it has received others one after another, all of them obscure one another. If the soul is a fluid body, it retains no figures and has no memory at all. Besides, is it not evident that the same object appears small in a little mirror and larger in a larger one? If you were to look at your face first in my pupil and then in a mirror, you would pronounce it tiny here and immense there. There, bodies are judged larger or smaller according to the size or smallness of the mirrors themselves. Yet images of almost every body shine in the human soul, and by them the soul judges how large bodies are. No body is so vast or so immeasurable that the soul cannot either behold or conceive it; indeed, beyond any body conceived, it can always conceive another still larger. It follows that no limit of magnitude has been prescribed for the soul—either with respect to the things it will comprehend or with respect to the soul's own substance. For if the soul possessed a magnitude of its own, above all it would be as large as its own body. Things so various, so clear, and so immense could not then shine in so small a living mirror, since images ordinarily appear larger or smaller according to the different size of the mirrors.