Seek guidance, O soul, in all your states toward taking what is beneficial for you and leaving what is harmful, so that you may be among the successful, rightly guided souls coupled with eternal and everlasting happiness.

O soul: Be certain of what I am unfolding and representing to you. I have examined this world and searched into it; I found the motion of its Prime Matter (Hyle) to be in the direction of beginning, but not in the sense of [conscious] experience. Thus, all that was subtle and noble gravitated toward the Heights, and all that was dense and coarse gravitated toward the Depths.

Furthermore, I found that the celestial motion divides the matter of this world into four origins: Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. I observed these four elements in their motions and meanings, and I found them to move by nature with the motion of wandering and death, not with the motion of intellect and experience.

I found things composed of these elements that possess life, speech, and intellect, and I marveled: how can dead, ignorant things be the origins of living, rational things?

Then I said: perhaps these elements, when they mingle within the bodies of rational animals, produce life and intellect therein. But how can the intellect accept that the dead mingling with the dead should produce between them a living being? Or that ignorance mingling with ignorance should result in an intellect?