Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Fifteenth argument. The mind's action has its end in action; a body's action, in a body.

1No body’s action properly ends in the action itself; rather, it passes into external matter. For if it ended in the action, that action would remain within the agent, which would then act upon itself—as though fire were to heat itself. A body cannot do this, because if a body does not act from itself, neither does it act upon itself. Again, if whatever a body does it does by moving, then, since it cannot move itself, it cannot act upon itself. Yet we see that the mind’s operation—intelligence itself—ends in the mind, and of itself produces nothing outside, except perhaps when at some time it moves the will, which sets the arms in motion and produces outwardly a work such as had been conceived. Sensation, however, is said in a certain way to flow outside itself, because it is moved from elsewhere, regards things foreign to itself, acts for the sake of an external end, and is not conscious of itself. Mind, by contrast, moves freely, beholds itself and its own contents, and acts for its own sake. Thus in Plato essence is called repose, because without life it lies dormant; life is called motion, because it has now gone forth into act; and mind is called reflection, because without reflection life would flow outward into an external work. Mind, however, arrests the vital motion of essence within itself and turns that motion back into essence through a certain awareness of itself. It also draws all other things to itself, considering things rather according to the mode in which mind itself exists than according to the mode in which they exist outside it. This is also called infinite reflection, because the human mind terminates in its own operation not only once but countless times: it notices that it understands something, recognizes that it notices, wills itself to will something, and wills that it wills itself to will, and so onward in the same manner. Here either one operation terminates endlessly in another, or the same operation is folded back upon itself without number.