11. The Lord is beyond (the conception of) the mind, and (the perception of) the six senses, and is yet the source of the mind and senses; but how could that formless and incorporeal being, be the cause of material and corporeal things?
12. The germ is the effect (or product), germinating from its causal source—the seed; but how and where can you expect to see the sprout springing without the productive seed?
13. No effect can ever result, without its formal cause or main-spring; say who has ever seen or found a tree to spring from and grow in empty air. (Nihil ex nihilo fit, et nihil in nihilum reverte posse).
14. It is imagination alone that paints these prospects in the mind, just as the fume of fancy shows you the sight of trees in the empty air; so it is the phrensy of the mind, that exhibits these phenomena before your eyes, but which in reality have no essentiality in them.
15. So, the universe as it appeared at its first creation, in the vacuity of the divine intellect; was all a congeries of worlds swimming in empty air (in their hollow ideal shapes).
16. (But the universe is not altogether a void and nihility). It is the same as it shines itself in the spacious intellect of the supreme soul (or spirit); it is the divine nature itself which is termed as creation, and which is an intellectual system having proceeded from the intellect, and the self-same divinity.
17. The vision of the world which is presented in our dream, and which is of daily occurrence to us, furnishes us with the best instance of this; when we are conscious of the sights of cities, and of the appearance of hills, all before our mental eyes in the dreaming state. (So this world is but a dream).
18. It is the nature of the Intellect as that of a dream, to see the vision of creation, as we view the appearance of the uncreated creation before our eyes, in the same manner as it appeared at first in the vast void (of divine mind).
19. There is but one unintelligible intelligence, a purely unborn and imperishable being, that appears now before us in the shape of this creation, as it existed with its everlasting ideas of infinite worlds, before this creation began.
20. There is no creation here, nor these orbs of earth and others; it is all calm and quiet with but One Brahma seated in his immensity.