Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

The soul ascends through four stages to spirit. First argument.

1We shall now enter the third part of the inquiry, which establishes our proposition from the power of understanding, provided that we first explain how, according to the Platonists, our soul rises in knowledge through four stages from body to spirit, the last of which is intelligence. It ascends through sensation, imagination, phantasy, and intelligence. Through sensation Socrates sees Plato: through his eyes he apprehends an incorporeal image of Plato apart from Plato’s matter, yet on this condition—that the eye cannot see Plato unless Plato’s own body is present. Then, even when Plato is absent, by inward imagination Socrates thinks of the color and figure he had seen, of the pleasant voice of Plato he had heard, and of all else he had received through the five senses. Imagination of this kind rises farther above matter than sensation does, both because it does not need bodies to be present in order to think of them and because it alone accomplishes what all five senses accomplish together. Yet it is not wholly pure, for it knows nothing except what sensation has received or conceived. Sensation is occupied with bodies, while imagination moves among images of bodies received or conceived through the senses. A little later, through phantasy, Socrates begins to judge the entire image of Plato which imagination itself had gathered through the five senses: ‘Who is this, so tall in body, broad in forehead and shoulders, fair in complexion, grey-eyed, with raised brow, aquiline nose, small mouth, and pleasant voice? This is Plato—a handsome and good man, a pupil most dear to me.’ You see how far Socrates’ phantasy surpasses his imagination. Imagination did indeed gather such an image of Plato, but it did not know whom or what manner of man the image represented. Phantasy now discerns that it is the image of this man called Plato: the handsome image of a good man and a friend. In these judgments phantasy already possesses some sense of substance, as some hold, and of beauty, goodness, and friendship. Yet the Platonists deny that phantasy truly knows substance, since it does not recognize the rational account of substance. Imagination does not even surmise the substance of a thing, but only its surface and outward picture; phantasy at least divines substance when it declares, ‘That figure approaching us is a man—and that man is Plato.’ It also seems in some manner to dream of incorporeal things when it judges Plato to be handsome, good, a friend, and a pupil. For beauty, goodness, friendship, and learning are incorporeal and lie open neither to sensation nor to imagination. Certain conceptions of phantasy are in a sense called incorporeal intentions of bodies.