ABSTRACT
When Bessarion’s book appeared the literary circle commonly known as the Platonic Academy of Florence was already well established. The name is time-honoured and convenient and may stand if one remembers that it does not represent an organized society with rules, officers, and a settled programme of study, but the group of friends and disciples who gathered round Marsilio Ficino and who were bound together by a common interest in his teaching and by the friendship and patronage of the Medici. Ficino himself, who was born in 1433, was the son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s physician. The humanists as a whole inclined towards a monistic view of the universe; and with the belief in a divine presence in nature and man there arose the conviction that some trace of universal truth must be discoverable in the recorded speculations of man’s mind.
