Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Thirteenth argument. A harmony of the humors receives nothing apart from matter.

1Whatever produces something must be more excellent than what is produced by it. The freer anything is from matter, the more sublime it is. A cause, therefore, must always be freer from matter than its effect. No effect, then, can be freer from matter than its own cause. The nutritive power is very free from matter, for we have shown elsewhere that it performs many things both above and beyond the order of the elements. The power of sensation is still freer from matter, because in the very act of sensing it receives the forms of things without the matter of those things. Sight does not receive the color of a wall together with the wall itself, but touches a spiritual image of its color. Understanding does the same to a much greater degree, as will appear in what follows. Since, therefore, these powers of the soul enjoy great freedom from matter, they cannot proceed from a cause that is itself matter or immersed in matter. The humors are wholly corporeal. They therefore cannot in any way produce powers of this kind through some mixture or concord of their own, much less the soul itself, the source of powers of this kind. For if the soul has its substance in the qualities of the humors, whatever it receives it will receive through the affections of the humors. Through these, however, only bodily forms are received. Through heat and dryness it will receive not a spiritual image of fire but the bodily substance of fire; in turn, through cold and dryness it will receive earth itself. Earth itself, since it receives in the same manner as the soul, will also sense in the same manner. A stone and all the rest will do the same.