Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

5Let us question once more the Epicureans who divide a species in the intellect as though it were a form in a body and locate one of its parts in one part of the mind—for example, the genus in the mind’s right side and the difference in its left. Why should the right-hand part be suited particularly to genus, and the left to difference? Is not every part of the mind equally mind? We must not make a mind out of mindless parts. Every particle of the mind therefore regards both genus and difference equally, and so every particle receives both. If each receives both and both are in each, genus and difference are not separated from one another. Yet, as the Epicureans would have it, chance causes one of the two to fall on the right and the other on the left. But let them tell us whether the two then remain distinct in this way or are mingled with each other. If they grant the former, it follows that knowledge cannot arise from them, for no definition is formed from a genus and difference separated from one another. Perfect knowledge of the thing itself is not possessed in either one taken apart. They must be mingled into one, so that one mind may possess one knowledge of one thing through one definition at one time. Both must indeed be present in the whole mind if they are truly to be understood. What is present in only part of the mind is not yet understood completely, for the act belongs to the whole thing, not to a part. They must therefore admit that genus and difference are mingled. But what mingles them—chance or the mind? Chance, they say. It is altogether impious to say so. Such a mixture would occur only very rarely; and whenever it did occur, they would at last have to concede that the elements so united are incorporeal, which is precisely what we maintain. In the end they will admit that the mind mingles them. From this concession we shall immediately infer two things. First, the mind is incorporeal if it brings the forms it receives into an incorporeal condition—a conclusion opposed to the Epicureans. Second, the mixture produced by the mind can be true only if some such union exists within the things themselves. For whatever the mind fashions apart from the nature of things is an invention rather than knowledge. Genus and difference must therefore be joined or separated from each other by nature, not by a fiction or spatial arrangement of the mind.