Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Twelfth argument. Harmony is understood either as the composition of the parts itself or as some proportion within that composition.

1When someone asserts that the soul is a concord, I think he can mean one of two things: either the composition itself of the humors and members, or some proportion within that composition. The soul is certainly not the composition itself, for then every part of the soul would have to be a composition of some parts of the body. How this could occur we plainly cannot explain. The composition of the body is manifest to natural philosophers, whereas the soul is unknown. It is difficult to understand how the soul is composed from its powers—namely, intellect, sensation, appetite, and the rest. Still more difficult is to understand how the individual powers compose the soul. Moreover, composition is nothing other than the union of many things, but many things are united only by one thing. By one, I mean, that inheres in the many, so that they are glued together as if by an inward glue. That one power implanted in the members, from which their union arises, is therefore the soul itself rather than the union that proceeds from it. Nor is the soul some proportion of the composition itself. For since different members of the body contain different relations and proportions of composition, each member would possess its own soul: bone one soul, nerve another, flesh another, and likewise for the rest, since these members are composed in proportions differing from one another. Yet we can by no means assign one life to a single living creature unless we give it one form, one mover and ruler—that is, one soul. We also see that the account of concord belongs more to qualities of the body than to the soul. Health is a concord of the humors, strength a concord of bones and nerves, and beauty, in a certain way, a concord of members and colors. But sensation and intellect, which are simple acts—I do not know what kind of harmonies they are or what they are harmonies of. When we know the substance of a thing, we can readily judge its accidents from it. Thus, because once we know the proportion of humors or members we can readily judge the things that pertain to health, strength, and beauty, it is clear that these three consist in their proportion. Yet when some such proportion has been found, we still do not clearly discern the soul's powers, affections, acts, and habits. It is therefore plain that the soul's substance does not consist in that proportion. Who, upon discovering it, would boast that he had thereby immediately discovered the nature of sensing and understanding? Aristotle understands the nature of these activities better than Hippocrates, whereas Hippocrates considers the proportion of those bodily constituents more carefully.