Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

7At this point Strato, or some Epicurean, will object: ‘Certainly the soul does not receive death, because when a death-bearing quality arrives the soul departs and ceases to be. If it ceases to be, it surely receives nothing.’ But, Epicurean, we are not so foolish as to be unaware that death cannot be received by anything. Death is itself nothing, and what does not exist cannot be received; moreover, neither the living nor the dead receive it. The living do not, because while they live they are absent from death. The dead do not because, if they do not exist, as you suppose, they receive nothing; and if they survive, as our philosophers hold, they too are absent from death. Let us stop playing with words and hear what we mean. When we say that the soul does not receive death, we mean that it admits into itself no death-bearing quality by which it ceases to live. Contrary qualities certainly do not receive one another: each in turn drives the other away and flees from it. Heat, therefore, not only does not receive cold by its nature; it does not even draw near to it in place. Things separated by the greatest natural interval drive one another away and flee to the greatest distance. Since these forms are of this character by nature, if each subsisted in its own pure nature alone and remained opposed just as it now is, they would never come near one another. Their natures would keep them apart, and no mediator would be present to reconcile them. So it would be if heat subsisted in itself, separated from matter and mixed with nothing but heat, and likewise with cold. As things stand, heat lies in matter; and matter, no less prepared by its own nature for cold than for heat, opens its bosom to the approaching cold. Cold enters and drives heat out. Once expelled, the heat is extinguished, because its author brought it into being under the law that it should remain only so long as it was cherished in that bosom of matter. Thus forms sustained by matter do not receive forms contrary to themselves, yet they perish under the assault and approach of those contraries.