Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

5Therefore, if there is nothing there beyond the common bulk of body alone, since that bulk is also present in dry wood and stones, these too will have a soul by which they are nourished. Since this is plainly false, the body of a certain kind which our opponent was calling the soul must contain not only the matter of body, but also some quality or form. Yet that thing is not called soul on account of the matter of body itself, since matter belongs to every body, even those devoid of life. It remains, then, that it is called soul on account of the form—the life-giving form, I mean. For this is proper to soul. We shall call the life-giving form itself the soul.

6The matter joined to it, however, since it thereby comes to share in life, we shall call neither soul nor a part of soul, but something animate. The present argument is especially confirmed by the proposition we advanced at the outset, when we argued that body can do nothing of itself. For we see that, when soul comes to bodies, many operations proceed from them which do not occur at all before the soul's arrival or after its departure. We therefore conclude that the soul, which is the principle of operations of this kind, is not a body.