Procli Diadochi In Primum Euclidis Elementorum Librum Commentarii

...and fashions within herself images and likenesses original: "εἴδωλα καὶ εἰκόνας" that are generated later and are less honorable than reality, by removing from herself the things that are naturally inseparable from matter original: "ἀφαιροῦσα τῆς ὕλης τὰ κατὰ φύσιν αὐτῆς ἀχώριστα"; how, then, do they not demonstrate the soul to be more inert and deficient than matter? For place is the material for things that have matter, and the soul is the material for the forms original: "εἴδη". Yet, the one is for the primary things, the other for the secondary; the one is for things that exist primarily, the other for those that subsist from the former; the one is for things that exist in essence, the other for those that have come to be through conception. How, then, is the soul—which primarily participates in the intellect and intellectual essence and is filled with knowledge from there—a receptacle of dimmer forms than matter, being the lowest seat among beings and the most imperfect regarding existence? But it is tedious to answer this opinion, which has already given an account of itself many times over. If, however, the mathematical forms original: "μαθηματικὰ εἴδη" are not formed by the abstraction of material things, nor by the collection of the common properties found in particulars, nor are they altogether generated later and derived from sensible objects, it is necessary that the soul must receive them either from itself, or from the intellect, or from both itself and that source. Yet if they are from the soul alone, how are these images of the intellectual forms? And how can they, having obtained no completion from the primary beings toward their existence, occupy a place between the indivisible and the divisible nature? And how do the forms in the intellect stand forth as the primary archetypal paradigms of all things? If they are from the intellect alone, how can the soul's power of self-activity and self-motion endure...