Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

13Nor could it imagine that it was a body, just as the souls of the multitude, created and educated otherwise as they now are, cannot consider themselves incorporeal. If anyone should say that this soul would deny that it was any of the bodies we receive through the five senses, but would affirm that it was some other body of a different nature, this is utterly empty. Even now, after perceiving so many different bodies, we cannot devise anything new which is not either present in them or at least composed or derived from them. How, then, in that condition could the mind, ignorant of these bodies, fashion the nature of a new kind of body? And even if it were possible for the soul to imagine some member of its own body, it would in no way think that member belonged to its proper substance. That mind will therefore affirm that it exists, yet it will affirm nothing corporeal of itself. What is affirmed and what is not affirmed are two different things. In that contemplation, therefore, the essence of the soul will be something besides body. We think the judgment reached in that contemplation will be true because it would follow the soul's wholly unadulterated nature, not images received from without. It would thus be a thoroughly natural judgment, and for that reason utterly true. If afterward it should awaken, as we are now awake, and begin to sense, it will not, as we are, be entirely unfit for investigating spiritual things. Rather, it will possess an easier path by which it may sometimes prepare itself for self-contemplation and pronounce that it is something besides body. Miserable souls now lack this path, because through nature and the senses they encountered both their own and other bodies before they considered themselves. From this came that pitiable error which leaves them unable to see themselves apart from the stain of body.