5. I repudiate the theory of the half-enlightened, who maintain the material world to be the production of the will or imagination; nor can I believe that the immaterial intellect, can either produce or guide the material body.
6. It is the will I ween, that the material breath of life, moves the living body to and fro; but tell me sir, what is that power which propels, the living breath both in and out of the beings.
7. Tell me sir, how the intangible intellect moveth the tangible body; and carries it about, as a porter bears a load all about.
8. Should the subtile intellect, be capable of moving the solid body at its will; then tell me sir, why cannot a man move a mountain also by his own will?
9. Vasishtha replied:—It is the opening and closing of the mouth of the aorta in the breast, that lets in and out the vital breath, through the passage of its hole and the lungs.
10. As you see the bellows of ironsmiths about you, having a hollow inside them, so it is the hollow of the aorta, which lets in and out the vital air, by the breathing of the heart.
11. Ráma rejoined:—It is true that the ironsmith closes and expands the valves of the bellows; but tell me sir, what power blows the wind pipe of the heart, and lets the air in and out of the inner lungs.
12. How the single breath of inhalation becomes a centuple (in order to pass into a hundred channels of the arteries), and how these hundreds combine again into one (in their exhalation); and why are some as sensible beings, and others as insensible as woods and stones.
13. Tell me sir, why the immovables have no oscillation at all; and why the moving bodies alone are possessed of their pulsation and mutation (and why <is> the vegetable creation deprived of motion, when it is possessed of sensibility in common with the animal creation).
14. Vasishtha replied:—There is an internal percipience (inner man), which moves the interior cords of the body; just as the ironsmith plies his bellows in the sight of men.