Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

Fifth argument: a body is by nature dispersed.

1Body is by its nature thoroughly dispersed. First, because it admits distance between its parts, so that one is always in one place and another elsewhere. Second, because it is continually transformed. For if it is subject to time, then just as successive moments follow one another in time, so its conditions change at every moment.

2This variation occurs even in the heavens, and much more in the elements under the sweep of the heavens. Third, because body is subject to contrary qualities, heat and cold and the like. Thus it is contrary to the nature of body to gather into one, to remain like itself, and to remain consistent with itself.

3For the very extension of quantity compels the parts of body to remain disjoined. Perpetual motion compels body to change its nature and not to possess all that is its own at once, but to lose one thing and seek another. The contrariety of qualities drives one to flee the other; through this flight the composite body itself is scattered.

4Although these considerations show that by its nature body cannot in any way stand firmly in unity, nevertheless every body is somehow bound together in its parts, all of them conspiring in the single bond of the whole body. There is therefore in body something beyond the nature of body that unites it, holds it firm, and contains it. It unites, I say, parts standing at a distance. It arrests their perpetual flux.