Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

3For that nature common to individual persons does not come about by chance, since it is always ordered in the same way; nor does it subsist by itself, since it cannot stand in itself but needs the foundation of matter. It is therefore brought about by some cause. Yet it is not brought about by matter, which does not form itself; nor by one person, who cannot act upon them all and, whatever that person produces, produces something particular, not common to the rest; nor by all persons, for insofar as they differ from one another they produce not something common but different things. Insofar as they agree, they agree through this very nature—indeed, through it they subsist; and it is prior to them to the same degree that it is simpler than they are. Their various properties supervene upon it as something prior in order to constitute the persons. Yet this nature itself, since it is one, is produced by some one form, a form standing above the multitude of persons; otherwise that form too would be produced by another, and that one in turn by another, without end. Thus we ascend to the divine Idea, which must stand above them all so that it may act equally in all and unite them by a common nature. If we must rise from a part beneath the whole to the whole, and from the whole to what stands above the whole, we rightly rise from individual persons, who occupy parts of place and time, to the nature common to them in itself, which is as though spread through every place and the whole of time; and from this nature to the principle that stands above all place and time, which Plato calls the Idea. Intellect next beholds this divine Idea, whether it apprehends the Idea as present within itself or as existing in the divine light. For reason declares that natural species, because they are everlasting, cannot proceed from a movable cause; otherwise, having been made through motion, they would at some time fail. Yet they have been made, since they are parts of the universe, whose composite being comes from another source, and they all proceed from one cause. For they are so ordered with one another that they converge upon one nature, one work, and one end. From this the human intellect concludes that above the movable world, in the immutable mind that moves the world, there are exemplar forms of the natural species—not in a bodily or animate nature, for then they would be movable, but in an intellectual, indeed an intelligible nature; for intelligible things must be placed in the supreme intelligible.