Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

2Yet the mind’s activity would be more sublime than its substance if its substance were merely some definite body while its understanding embraced every body and incorporeal things as well. The mind is therefore not a body, since beyond every kind of body it also apprehends the incorporeal. Nor, again, is the mind a form mixed with a body. For just as a mixed form becomes divisible through the body’s division, so it takes its character from the body’s quality. The mind would therefore contract some determinate quality from the body. Confined by it to one species of bodily things, it would know only that species, just as sight is confined through the eye to colors. And, as we have said, it would receive neither forms most like itself nor forms most unlike it. The Platonists confirm this teaching of Aristotle. They add that if the mind were mixed with a body, it would not grasp incorporeal things, because what is mixed does not comprehend what is pure; nor would it desire to reach anything separate from body, for then it would desire to be separated from the body and dissolved. It would know only in the manner in which it is moved, as a material potency is accustomed to do. Yet the mind does not abstract, range in thought, and reflect back upon itself almost without end by being moved, but by producing forms for itself. And let no Epicurean clamoring in our ears deny that the intellect grasps incorporeal things. Indeed, the mind always desires incorporeal things, and it alone grasps them with supreme delight, as things most like itself. It not only desires and grasps them, but even brings them forth. For what else are we now attempting in these arguments except, so to speak, to fashion with the hands of our mind a thing utterly alien to body? We have already fashioned it and are fashioning it still, and with those same hands of the mind we touch and handle it. Before we fashioned it, moreover, we foresaw that it was to be fashioned. For when we first resolved to show that the soul is incorporeal, we already beheld somewhere a certain degree of incorporeal nature toward which we wished to lead the soul. What do we do each day in disputation? Whenever we affirm that some thing exists although it has no length, breadth, depth, quality, or figure, we assuredly create in the mind a certain spirit above body and the passions of body. Our mind is truly present where it gives birth; it gives birth, I say, to an offspring most like itself and in no way more sublime than its own substance. Our mind therefore rises above bodies and the conditions of bodies. Hence it is neither enclosed by place nor circumscribed by the limits of time. It can therefore exist everywhere and always; and so nothing prevents it from being perpetual.