Commentary on the First and Second Chapters of the Thirtieth Book of the Natural History of Gaius Plinius Secundus

marked by the virtue of Ideas, and illuminated by superior Ideas. For they define an Idea as a form above bodies, souls, and minds, one, simple, pure, indivisible, incorporeal, eternal, and the same nature of all things. For they place Ideas in the Good itself, and through the mode of cause, by certain relative reasons. They place them, moreover, in the soul of the world through forms, absolute forms: forms, I say, differing among themselves, they place in the soul, in minds, in nature, as certain lowest seeds of forms infused by the Ideas. To this is added that there are as many seminal reasons of things in the soul of the world as there are Ideas (as some philosophers hold) in the Divine mind, by which it has claimed for itself figures even beyond the stars in the heavens, and has impressed upon them all wondrous properties. From these stars, therefore, and figures and properties, all the virtues and properties of inferior things, both occult and manifest and natural, depend. So that each species has its own celestial figure congruent to itself, from which a wonderful property and energy in operating can flow, such as it receives through the seminal reasons of the soul of the world, receiving its own gift from the Idea. Ideas are indeed (as I see it is pleasing to the Platonists) the causes not only of the existence of any species, but also of every virtue which is inherent in such a species, and they collect that the position and figure of celestial bodies are the cause of things and the causes of their virtues. Furthermore, they assert that singular gifts are inherent in many individuals: gifts, I say, as wonderful in species as in other things, because of the celestial figure. For every individual, when it begins to exist under a determined horoscope or celestial constellation, draws into itself a wondrous force of acting and suffering (but not necessity) even beyond that which it has from its species, both through influx and through the obedience of the matter of generable things to the soul of the world, which they claim to be such as the obedience of our body to our souls. Orpheus and Democritus and most of the Pythagoreans declared that the forces of celestial bodies and the natures of inferior things are full of Gods: