Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

9What could be more foolish than to concede that reason makes us superior to the beasts, to acknowledge that the things perceived by sense possess reality—although some beasts perceive them more keenly than we do—and yet to contend that what we behold with the eye of reason is nothing? No animal would be less wise than man if the power of the soul proper to man were more deceptive than sense, which he shares with beasts. It is an outrage to call the king of animals the most insane of them all. Yet the truly insane man is the one who will not admit that the object of mind is as far superior to the object of sense as mind is superior to sense, and therefore that incorporeal natures are truly found within a more excellent order of substance than corporeal things. For if the objects of mind move it as sensible objects move sense, those intellectual objects must possess some substance in their own right if they are to move the mind. But if the intellect is said not to be affected by its objects, then at least the intellect itself has already been sufficiently shown to be an incorporeal nature, since, while fashioning its own works, it is not moved by another and fashions incorporeal structures. We should remember that a child born blind finds it difficult to believe in the variety of colors or the existence of light, although nothing is clearer than light to everyone else. In the same way, a soul only lately enveloped in the darkness of the body can scarcely be brought to believe that an incorporeal light exists, although to the angels nothing in the order of things is more manifest. Plato laments this at length in the seventh book of the Republic, and Aristotle confirms it in the second book of the Divine Philosophy, saying that the human intellect stands toward things which are in themselves most manifest in the order of reality just as an owl's eye stands toward the light of the sun.