Then, since he was unable to mislead it, the representative left and next came across the little house known as a cell of the body. He said to it in the language of philosophy and nature: "I could not persuade the particle and red corpuscle but perhaps you will be reasonable. Since you have been made of several substances just like a minute house, I am able to make you. You will be my artefact and true property." The cell responded to him through the tongue of wisdom and truth, saying:
"I am only a minute little thing but I have very important duties and very sensitive relations; I am connected to the body as a whole as well as to all its cells. For example, I perform complex and faultless duties in the veins, and in regard to the arteries, the sensory and motor nerves, the powers of attraction and repulsion and procreation, and the imaginative faculty. If you have the knowledge and power to form, arrange, and employ the whole body and all its blood-vessels, nerves and faculties, and if you have comprehensive wisdom and penetrating power with which to control all the body's cells, which are like me, as regards qualities and artistry we are brothers, demonstrate it. Only then can you claim to be able to make me. If you cannot, then off with you!
"The red corpuscles bring my food, while the white ones combat illnesses which attack me. I have work to do, do not distract me! Anyway, an impotent, lifeless, deaf and blind thing like you cannot in any way interfere with us. For we have such an exact, subtle and faultless order³ that if the one who has authority over us was not Absolutely Wise, Absolutely Powerful and Absolutely Knowing, our order would be broken and our regularity spoilt."
Then the one making the claims despaired of it, too. He encountered the body of a human being and said to it, once again as the Naturalists say, in the language of blind nature and aimless philosophy: "You are mine, it is I who made you; or anyway I have a share in you."
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3. The All-Wise Maker has created the human body as though it was a well-arranged city. A number of the blood-vessels perform the duties of telephones and telegraphs, while others of them are like pipes from a fountain through which blood, which is the water of life, flows. As for blood, created within it are two sorts of corpuscles. One of them, known as red corpuscles, distributes nutrients to the cells of the body; it conveys sustenance to the cells according lo a Divine law. (Like merchants and food officials.) The other sort are white corpuscles, which arc fewer in number than the former. Their duty, like soldiers, is defence against enemies, such as illness. Whenever they undertake that defence, with their two revolutions like Mevlevi dervishes, they take on a swift and wonderful state. As for blood as a whole, it has two general duties: the first is to repair damage done to the body's cells and the second is to collect any waste-matter from the cells and to clean the body. There are two sorts of bloodvessels, veins and arteries. One of these carry purified blood, they are the channels through which clean blood is conveyed. The others are the channels for the turbid blood which collects the waste-matter; these convey the blood to where breathing occurs; that is, the lungs.
The All-Wise Maker created in the air two elements, nitrogen and oxygen. As for oxygen, when it comes into contact with the blood in breathing, it draws to itself, like amber, the impure element, carbon, which is polluting the blood. The two combine and are transformed into matter called carbonic acid gas. Oxygen also maintains the body temperature, and purifies the blood. This is because, in the science of chemistry, the All-Wise Maker bestowed on oxygen and carbon an intense relationship, which might be described as 'chemical passion', whereby, according to this Divine law, when those two elements come close to each other, they combine. It has been established by science that heal is produced by combining, because it is a sort of combustion.
The wisdom in this is as follows: the motion of the particles of those two elements is dif-lerent. On combining, the particles of one clement unite with those of the other, each two particles thereafter moving with a single motion. One motion remains suspended, because before combining there were two motions; now two particles have become one. Each pair of particles has acquired a motion like a single particle. The other motion is transformed into heat according to a law of the All-Wise Maker. As a matter of a fact, 'motion produces heat' is an established principle.
Thus, as a consequence of this fact, by this chemical combination, as carbon is removed I rom the blood the body temperature of human beings is maintained and at the same time the blood is purified. On inhaling, oxygen both cleanses the body's water of life and kindles the lire of life. On exhaling, it yields, in the mouth, the fruit of words, which are miracles of Divine Power.
GLORY BE UNTO HIM AT WHOSE ART THE MIND IS BEWILDERED.