Ideas, natural ascent and rest

Use in the book

V.12.13 has argued that soul continues to receive life because its essence depends immediately upon stable God. The ensuing cognition argument gives that nature a positive activity. Insofar as soul is rational, it daily produces separate forms within itself by its natural power, even without discipline or practice. These forms provide the nearer route toward eternal Ideas. The assertion concerns an intrinsic rational capacity, not a denial that particular people learn, practice or make mistakes.

The next inference is teleological. If ascent to Ideas is natural to rational mind, rest in Ideas must also be natural. Ficino moves from living through them to living in them, and from continual activity directed toward perpetual objects to perpetual activity among those objects. “Through” marks dependence and means; “in” marks the proposed fulfillment of that dependence. Continual striving during embodied life and perpetual fulfilled activity are thus related but not identical conditions.

V.12.15 supplies the mode principle. Every Idea is eternal life, so what can attain an Idea according to an Idea's mode can attain everlasting life in an eternal mode. The repeated modus is not decorative. The inference requires more than merely mentioning an eternal object: mind must be able to receive or attain it in the object's appropriate manner. This is another use of the relation between the mode of a recipient and the act it receives. It belongs to Ficino's metaphysics of cognitive assimilation rather than to an empirical claim that thinking about infinity makes an organism physically immortal.

V.13.18 supplies a related, explicitly attributed exemplary account. God produces through Ideas, defined as absolute exemplary principles. The immediate effect should most closely resemble its source; remoter effects resemble it less. Rational soul's production through the Idea of life gives it stable life, while derivative animation mediated through soul is naturally mutable. The reported ethereal vehicle qualification then explains how a derivative life can be continuously sustained without becoming the same kind of self-subsisting source.

The earlier seal example likewise gives an Idea a determinate preserving role: approaching the exemplar confirms this mind's assigned mode of being rather than dissolving its identity. V.13.16's different Ideas of angel and soul also explain unequal perfections from one immediate maker. These contexts prevent “Idea” from becoming a loose synonym for any thought a person happens to have. In this book Ideas are exemplary causes and objects of rational attainment, while species produced within cognition are the more immediate forms by which that attainment is approached.

Places to read

1. V.11.6Conformity to the Idea preserves a mind’s determinate identity.
2. V.12.13, V.12.14, V.12.15Natural rational formation leads from ascent to rest and from continual striving to perpetual life according to the Idea’s mode.
3. V.13.16, V.13.18Different exemplars and different degrees of immediate production distinguish created ranks and modes of life.

Translation in this edition

The supplied apparatus explicitly preserves the transitions from through Ideas to in Ideas and from continual toward to perpetual within. It translates species absolutae as separate forms. V.13.18 is framed as the view of Timaeus and Plato and later Platonists; the reported ethereal embodiment should retain that attribution.