Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

18Timaeus and Plato teach that God, the maker of the world, brings forth his works through the Ideas—that is, through absolute exemplary principles. Whatever is created immediately through this or that Idea therefore remains forever what it is; what comes afterward is of that character not necessarily forever but only at times. The effect nearest its cause must issue from it in the closest likeness; a more remote effect is less like it, and each succeeding effect grows still more unlike. Thus an Idea is a power existing in itself, all at once and eternally. The power produced immediately from it does not exist in itself but in another, yet it exists forever; what is produced at the next remove neither exists in itself nor by its nature remains forever the same or like itself. Since the rational soul is made immediately through the Idea of life, by virtue of the power of that proximate origin it is a form that lives forever. The irrational soul, because it proceeds from that Idea through the rational soul, lives in itself only at times. What is created by the action of an Idea alone is created by an entirely stable action and so possesses a stable essence. What is born from an Idea through the soul as intermediary is generated by a mutable action and is therefore compelled to derive from it a nature mutable in itself. “In itself,” I say, because the Platonists hold that the life impressed by the soul upon its ethereal vehicle, as upon an everlasting mirror, always accompanies the soul that impresses it; the life impressed upon a composite and perishable body, however, does not always accompany the soul. They think that the ethereal body nearest the soul is perpetually animated by the soul’s ever-living substance, but that the elemental body receives life from the soul through the ethereal body only at certain times. We shall treat these matters elsewhere.