Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

4If this capacity were finite, it would either be filled by some finite thing, or at least its thirst for both human and divine things would be relieved. But now, through the attainment of any finite things, its thirst not only is not extinguished but burns more ardently. For the more the mind, by receiving many things, approaches the infinite God in a certain preparation, the more fiercely it burns with its own fire as it draws nearer, and the more swiftly it rushes, now close to the infinite end of its motion. The element of fire does the same when it returns to its proper sphere. A stone does so even more plainly when it descends from a height: the nearer it comes to the earth, the more forcefully it is borne down to earth. Who would call mind an elemental body, or anything corporeal at all, if it possesses an infinite power? I mean a power both of persevering and receiving, and of encompassing and traversing, whether it has this power from itself or—as I should more truly say—through a certain divine enlargement. For the absolute infinity of God implants an intellectual and vital infinity in minds and souls that depend most immediately upon it, preserves that infinity continually, and recalls it from an infinite principle to an infinite end. For if some communicated quality resembling an absolute quality commonly flows from it everywhere, what wonder is it that from absolute infinity some infinity of one kind or another should flow forth somewhere—above all into minds and souls, through which the Platonists believe the infinite succession of time and generation proceeds within the world? Who, then, will be so senseless as to maintain that mind must have some limit to its duration, when it has no such limit at least in its so greatly enlarged power and operation—as though it could possess outside itself a limit that it does not possess within itself? If life precedes intelligence in origin, while intelligence surpasses life in worth, and if the human soul has been endowed with such dignity that a power of understanding and willing which is in some manner infinite has been granted to it, then much earlier and in still greater measure there must have been granted to it an infinite power of living.