Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Second argument: the soul is neither an animate body nor an inanimate one.

1What kind of body do you wish the soul to be—animate or inanimate? You will not call it inanimate, for it gives animal life to another. How, indeed, could soul vivify bodies if it were an inanimate body? Nor can you call it an animate body. For if soul is said to be an animate body, surely that body, once called animate, is called so through some soul.

2Concerning that soul I ask again: is it a body or not? If it is a body, is it animate or inanimate? If you answer inanimate, the absurdity is plain. If animate, I shall ask again about the soul through which it is called animate. And you will be forced to proceed to infinity so long as you assert that soul is a body, and always be compelled to answer absurdly. For both answers appear deranged: that soul is animate, and that it is inanimate—just as it would be deranged to say of wisdom both that it is wise and that it is foolish.

3Or take light: it would be both illuminated and dark. For just as the light that illuminates other things is neither dark nor illuminated by another—since it is itself the first light—so the soul is neither inanimate, because it gives life, nor animated by something else, since it is itself, properly speaking, that by which everything is truly animated. If you refer it to something else by which it is animated, I shall likewise refer that other thing again to another, and that one again to another. I shall never cease; or if I do cease, I shall certainly come to rest in this very conclusion: either the thing first posited, or something subsequent, is neither animated nor vivified by another but is itself, properly and through itself, that which animates and vivifies another.