my heart I may abide,
And with my thoughts I may be deified?

The Platonists say that the soul, as to its superior part, always
consists in the intellect, in which it has more of understanding than of
soul, seeing that it is called soul only in so far as it vivifies the
body and sustains it. So here, the same essence which nourishes and
maintains the thoughts on high, together with the exalted heart, is
induced by the inferior part to afflict itself, and recall them as
rebels.

CIC. So that they are not two contrary existences, but one, subject to
two contradictory terms?

TANS. So it is, precisely. As the ray of the sun which touches the
earth, and is joined to obscure and to inferior things, which it
brightens, vivifies, and kindles, and is then joined to the element of
fire--that is, to the star, whence it proceeds, and has its beginning,
and is diffused, and in which it has its own and original
subsistence--so the soul, which is in the horizon of Nature, is
corporeal and incorporeal, and contains that with which it rises to
superior things and declines to things inferior. And this, you may
perceive, does not happen by reason and order of local motion, but
solely through the impulse of one and of another power or faculty. As
when the sense rises to the imagination, the imagination to the reason,
the reason to the intellect, the intellect to the mind, then the whole
soul is converted into God, and inhabits the intelligible world; whence,
on the other hand, she descends in an inverse manner to the world of
feeling, through the intellect, reason, imagination, sense, vegetation.

CIC. It is true that I have heard that the soul, in order to put itself
in the ultimate degree of divine things, descends into the mortal body,
and from this goes up again to the divine degrees, which are three
degrees of intelligence. For there are others in which the intellectual
surpasses the animal, which are said to be the celestial intelligences;
and others in which the animal surpasses the intellectual, which are the
human intelligences; others there are, of which those things are equal,
as those of demons or heroes.

TANS. The mind then cannot desire except that which is near, close,
known, and familiar. The pig cannot desire to be a man, nor wish for
those things that are suitable to the human appetite. He likes better
to turn about in mud than in a bed of linen, he would prefer a sow to
the most beautiful of women, because t