Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

12We shall begin to understand that the error of the common people is born from bodily habit if we imagine at least some education contrary to theirs, such as Avicenna devises in the sixth book of his Natural Philosophy. ‘Let a human being,’ Avicenna says, ‘be created by God in an instant, already at the perfection of adulthood, but so disposed that he apprehends nothing through any of the five senses.’ The mind of a person so constituted will think of something, for he is an adult, at an age when the structure of the body does not disturb understanding, and he is not occupied with the operations of the senses that impede the operation of mind. Let there also be something present that can be understood. The very substance of the soul is present to the mind. The mind, disturbed by nothing, will therefore contemplate the soul's substance present to it. But what will it take that substance to be? Colored, long, or broad? Certainly not, for a blind person apprehends no such things. Sounding, sweet-smelling, or the like? Not these either, for it has not yet received anything of that kind through the senses from which it could assign such a nature to the soul. Thus that soul will be able to attribute nothing corporeal to itself. What, then, will it affirm of itself? At least what first presents itself to intuition—its own essence. It will therefore affirm that it exists, but will discern nothing corporeal within itself. And so it will affirm that it is wholly incorporeal.