7. Granting the existence of ignorance, in absence of the advance of knowledge and reason; yet it is at best but a fiend of delusion, and is as shapeless as the darkest night (When nothing is to be seen). 8. Granting the existence of creation, we have no trace of ignorance any where in it (since creation is the production of omniscience, there is no nescience in any part of) the existence of two moons in the sky. 9. Creation having no other cause (but God himself), we know not how could ignorance find a place in it; just so it is impossible for a tree to grow in the air (which God hath made void, barren, and bare). (God hath planted the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden, but no tree of ignorance did He set any where). 10. When creation began and was begotten in the beginning, in its pure and subtile form in the womb of absolute vacuum (or the mind of God); how is it possible for the material bodies of earth and water to proceed (from the immaterial spirit) without a material cause? 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).