Dialogue on Divine and Human Love

insensible bodies, so that if a man falls from a height he will naturally tend downward, as a heavy body. In animals, too, this natural inclination is found, for as heavy bodies they naturally seek the bottom—that is, the center of the earth—as their own known and desired place.

SOPHIA. What reasons do you have to call these natural inclinations "sensitive love"? For love would seem properly to be an effect of the will In Renaissance philosophy, the "will" is a specific faculty of the rational soul; Sophia is arguing that without reason, there can be no true love., and the will (among all lower beings) is found only in humans; call the others appetite or inclination, but not love.

PHILONE. Things are known by their opposites; for as Aristotle original: "Aristotile" says, the science of opposites is one and the same. The opposite of this is and is called Hate; therefore, this should reasonably be called love. Just as in humans voluntary hate is the opposite of love, so in animals the hate of things unsuitable for life is the opposite of the love of suitable things. Thus the animal flees one and follows the other; for hate is the cause of making it flee, just as love is the cause of making it follow. In irrational bodies, there is a natural love of the heavy for the bottom, and for that reason it follows it, just as it flees the top because it holds it in hate; and the light body is the opposite, for it loves the top and hates the bottom. And just as hate is found in all, so love is found in all.

SOPHIA. And how can one who has neither reason, nor sense, nor imagination—as these lower and insensible bodies are—possess knowledge?

PHILONE. Although they do not have these cognitive powers within themselves, they are directed by Nature, which knows all lower things, or rather by the Soul of the World Soul of the World The Anima Mundi, a Neoplatonic concept describing an intermediate force that animates the physical universe and carries out the divine plan., in a direct and infallible knowledge of its natural things for the preservation of their natures.

SOPHIA. And how can one love who does not feel?

PHILONE. Just as lower bodies are rightly directed by Nature to know their end and their proper places, so they are directed by her to love them and desire them, and to move themselves to find them when they are separated from them. Just as the Arrow original: "Saetta" seeks the mark directly, not through its own knowledge, but through the knowledge of the archer by whom it is directed, so these bodies seek their own end and place, not through their own knowledge, but through the direct knowledge of the First Creator, infused into the soul of the world and into the universal nature of lower things; so that just as the inclination of the arrow comes...