Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Fifth argument. If the mind is a body, it understands by touching things and by traversing them.

1If the mind is a body, or a form diffused throughout the magnitude of a body, it contains two things within itself, as we have shown elsewhere: a point and breadth. It is bound by the same conditions as the body. It will therefore apprehend things to be understood only by touching them, enlarging itself through them, and traversing them as a body does. It must accordingly be said to touch in order to understand either with a point alone, with breadth alone, or with both. If it uses only a point and needs contact in order to know, it will not know the magnitudes of things, since through a point it reaches points, not magnitudes. Even if it did reach magnitudes, the mind as a whole would never know them in their entirety. For the points within it are infinite, and those within a magnitude are likewise infinite. The intellect is the aggregate of all the former, while magnitude is in a certain way the aggregate of the latter. But an infinity cannot be traversed. The whole mind will therefore never understand, nor will it understand a whole magnitude. Thus it does not use a point alone. Does it then use breadth alone in order to touch? By no means. It would know only those things which are touched by breadth itself, and these are only things which are themselves extended in breadth. Yet we know many other things besides these. Some will seek refuge in the claim that the mind uses both point and breadth in knowing: the point for simple things and breadth for everything else. This appears plausible, but it is not true. Through a point the mind would reach only simple things that can be applied to a body as a point can; it would not reach separate forms or numbers. Then, through its breadth, it would have to run across the whole magnitude of the body to be known in order to understand it as a whole. But no breadth can traverse an entire space of magnitude unless each part of that breadth, stretched lengthwise, runs across each part of the space. The mind will therefore move each of its parts in succession toward each part of the body to be known, and it will know by moving toward it. Yet it will be moving parts that are in a sense infinite, for that is how many parts the mind will have if it possesses bodily breadth. In a brief time, then, it will understand each portion of the body in an almost innumerable fashion, and it will grasp the body itself, in its nearly infinite particles known innumerably, an infinite number of times, so to speak, and without number.