Hayy ibn Yaqzan

This is an AI modernization of Hayy ibn Yaqzan into contemporary English. The original is available from Wikisource. Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Ibn Tufayl (about 1105–1185) was born near Granada in al-Andalus, the Muslim south of Spain, and became a physician, a philosopher and a court official under the Almohads, the dynasty that ruled Morocco and Spain from Marrakesh. He was personal physician to the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, a ruler with a taste for philosophy, and it was Ibn Tufayl who introduced him to the young Ibn Rushd, later famous in Europe as Averroes, and suggested he write commentaries on Aristotle. This story is Ibn Tufayl's only surviving book.

It begins as an adventure. A baby is washed up, or perhaps simply grows out of the earth, on an island below the equator, and is raised by a doe. When she dies, the boy cuts her open to find what has left her, and from that moment he learns everything by himself: anatomy, fire, tools, the nature of matter, the movements of the stars, and at last the existence of God and a way of seeing Him directly. Then a man arrives from a neighboring island where people follow a revealed religion, and the two discover that what Hayy found by reason and what the prophets taught agree. Their attempt to explain this to the islanders goes badly.

Ibn Tufayl borrowed the name from a shorter allegory by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the great Persian philosopher of the century before, and presented his story as an answer to a friend's question about Ibn Sina's "Eastern wisdom." That is why it opens with a letter and a survey of the philosophers of his day, and why its later pages turn from physics to mysticism. The science is the science of the twelfth century: the heavens are spheres, the world is made of four elements, and life is a hot vapor in the heart. His view that the wise may reach truths that ordinary believers should receive only in the form of religion was a live and dangerous question in his world.

The book traveled. A Latin translation by Edward Pococke appeared at Oxford in 1671 under the title The Self-Taught Philosopher, and English versions followed, including Simon Ockley's in 1708. It is often said to have given Daniel Defoe some of the idea for Robinson Crusoe.

This edition translates the story and Ibn Tufayl's closing words from the Arabic text on Wikisource. That text lacks the opening letter, and no other Arabic text could be reached, so the Introduction is retold from Ockley's English translation of 1708, with Ockley's own notes left out.

Contents

Ibn Tufayl's Introduction

The Story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan

Ibn Tufayl's Introduction

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise be to God, the Eternal and Almighty, infinitely wise and merciful, who "taught by the pen," and out of his great kindness to humankind "taught man what he did not know." I praise him for his excellent gifts and thank him for his constant favors. I testify that there is no god but God, who has no partner, and that Muhammad is his servant and messenger, a man of a noble spirit, with clear proofs to convince the mind and a victorious sword to defend the faith. May God's blessing be on him, on his Companions, who were people of great thoughts and vast understanding, and on all his followers until the end of the world.

Dear friend, you asked me (may God keep you forever and give you a share of lasting happiness) to tell you what I know about the secrets of "Eastern philosophy," the term used by Ibn Sina, the philosopher the West called Avicenna. Anyone who wants clear and precise knowledge has to work hard to find it. Your request set my thoughts moving in a noble direction. It led me to understand things I had never understood before, and it lifted me to a height that no tongue, however eloquent, can describe. The reason is that this experience is of a completely different kind from the things of this world. All I can say is that whoever reaches any degree of it is so overcome with joy, delight, and exultation that he cannot hide what he feels. He has to burst out with some general expressions, because he cannot be specific. And if a man who has never been trained by a good education reaches that state, he pours out strange words and hardly knows what he is saying. One such man, in that state, cried out, "Glory be to me! How great is my majesty!" Another said, "I am the Truth!" Another said that he was God.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, when he reached it, put it like this:

     It was what it was; I will not describe it.
     Ask no more, and think the best.

But al-Ghazali was a well-educated man, well trained in the sciences. Now consider what Ibn Bajja says at the end of his discourse on the union. Anyone who understands the purpose of his book, he says, will see plainly that this degree cannot be reached by any of the sciences then in use. He himself reached what he knew by cutting himself off completely from everything he had learned before. He was given other kinds of understanding, entirely independent of matter and too noble to be counted as part of our natural life. They belong only to the blessed, and so we may call them divine properties, which God (praised be his name) gives to whichever of his servants he pleases.

The degree that Ibn Bajja describes can be reached through reasoning. I have no doubt that he reached it himself. But it is not the same as the one I mean, though the two differ less in kind than in degree. What I am describing contradicts none of his discoveries. The difference is that on my way there is more clarity and light. Here we grasp things by means of something that we cannot properly call a "faculty." None of the words used in everyday speech, or in the writings of scholars, can express what this kind of perception grasps with.

This degree I am speaking of (and I might never have tasted it, if your request had not pushed me to search further) is the very thing Ibn Sina means when he says: "When a person's longing is strong and he has practiced enough, small glimmers of the Truth begin to appear to him, like flashes of lightning, delightful, that shine on him for a moment and go out. The more he practices, the more often he sees them, until he knows them so well that they come to him on their own, without any practice at all. Then, whenever he notices anything, he turns to the Divine Essence and keeps some impression of it. Then something suddenly comes to him, and he begins to see the Truth in everything. Through steady practice he finally reaches perfect calm. What used to come and go becomes a habit, what was a glimmer becomes a steady light, and his knowledge becomes constant and firm." That is Ibn Sina's own account. He also describes the stages by which a person is brought to this perfection, until his soul is like a polished mirror in which he sees the Truth. Then he is flooded with pleasure and rejoices deeply in his mind, because of the impressions of the Truth that he perceives there. Once he has come this far, the next thing that occupies him is that he looks sometimes toward the Truth and sometimes toward himself, and he moves back and forth between the two, until he withdraws from himself completely and looks only toward the Divine Essence. If he does look at his own soul at any point, it is only because his soul is turned toward God. From this comes perfect union with God.

By this account, Ibn Sina does not allow that this "tasting" is reached by reasoning or by drawing conclusions. To help you see the difference between the perception of these people and the perception of the others, let me give you an everyday example. Imagine a man born blind, but quick-minded, with a good capacity to learn, a sticky memory, and sound judgment. He has lived in the town where he was born. With the help of his other senses he has come to know many of the neighbors, the various kinds of animals and inanimate things, and the streets and houses, so that he can walk anywhere in town without a guide, recognize the people he meets, and call them by name. He also knows the names of the colors and how they differ, from the descriptions and definitions he has been given. Now suppose that after learning all this, his eyes are opened. When he walks around town, he finds everything exactly as he had imagined it, and the colors are just what the descriptions had led him to expect. The difference between how he knew things when blind and how he knows them now that he can see comes down to two things, one following from the other: more clarity, and great delight.

From this it is clear that the condition of those thinkers who have not yet reached the union with God is exactly the condition of the blind man. The blind man's idea of colors, gained from descriptions, matches what Ibn Bajja called "too noble to be counted as part of natural life," the things "God gives to whichever of his servants he pleases." But the condition of those who have reached the union, who have been given what I told you cannot properly be called a "faculty," is the second state of the blind man, once his sight has been restored. Notice, though, that our comparison does not fit in every respect. It is very rare to find anyone "born with his eyes open" who can reach these things without any help from thinking.

Now, dear friend, when I speak of the ideas of the thinker, I do not mean what people learn from the study of nature. And when I speak of the knowledge of those who have reached the union, I do not mean what people learn from the study of what lies beyond nature. These are two very different ways of learning, and they must never be confused. What I mean by the ideas of the thinker is what is gained by the study of what lies beyond nature, and this is the kind of knowledge Ibn Bajja had. For the understanding of such matters one condition is absolutely required: that they be plainly and clearly true. Then there is a middle kind of reflection, between that and the state of those who have reached the union, in which people work on these questions with greater clarity and delight.

Now Ibn Bajja criticizes anyone who mentions the pleasure of the union in front of ordinary people. He also said that this pleasure belongs to the imagination. And he promised to write a book on it, in which he would explain the whole matter and describe, clearly and precisely, the condition of those fortunate enough to reach it. We can answer him with the old proverb: "Don't call a thing sweet before you have tasted it." He never kept his promise or produced anything like it. It is likely that the reason was either that he ran out of time, because he was busy with his journey to Oran, or else that he knew that any attempt to describe that state would force him to say things that would clearly reproach his own way of living and contradict the principles he had laid down elsewhere, where he encourages people to pile up wealth and suggests ways of doing it.

In this discussion we have wandered a little from the main point of your request, as we had to. From what has been said, your request must mean one of two things. First, you might want me to describe what is seen and tasted by those who are lucky enough to reach the union. That cannot be described as it really is. When anyone tries to put it into speech or writing, he changes it completely and slides into the reasoning way of speaking. Once you dress it in letters and words, it comes closer to the world of bodies and no longer stays in the state it was in. The meanings of the words used to explain it are altered, so that it leads some people into real mistakes and makes others think they are mistaken when they are not. The reason is that it is boundless. It contains all things in itself, but is contained by none.

Second, your request might mean that I should show you how people proceed who give themselves to contemplation. This, my friend, can be put into speech and writing. But it is as scarce as old gold, especially in this part of the world where we live. It is so rare that hardly one person in a thousand gets even a taste of it. And of those few, almost none have passed on anything they knew of it, except through obscure hints and insinuations. The Muslim religion and its law, in fact, discourage people from diving too deep into this matter.

Nor should you think that the philosophy in the books of Aristotle, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina's book that he calls The Healing (al-Shifa) gives you what you are after. None of the philosophers of Spain has written fully and satisfactorily about it either. The scholars raised in Spain before logic and philosophy took root there spent their whole lives on mathematics. They made great progress in it, it must be said, but went no further. After them came a generation who gave themselves more to the art of reasoning. They did better than their predecessors, but still did not reach true perfection. One of them said:

     It is hard that there are only two kinds of knowledge:
     one wrong, the other true.
     The first is worth nothing once you have it;
     the other is difficult to reach.

After these came others who advanced further and came closer to the truth. Among them was one whose mind was sharper, or whose ideas were truer, than Ibn Bajja's. But he was too taken up with worldly business, and he died before he had time to open the treasury of his knowledge. So most of his surviving works are unfinished, including his book On the Soul and his Regimen of the Solitary, which is about how a person should manage himself when he lives alone. His logic and his physics are unfinished too. The pieces of his that are complete are only short treatises and occasional letters. In fact, in his letter on the union, he himself admits that he wrote nothing complete. There he says that it would take a great deal of trouble and effort to express clearly what he had set out to prove, that the method he used to explain himself was not in many places as exact as it could have been, and that he meant to revise it if he had the time.

So much for Ibn Bajja. I never saw him myself, and his contemporaries were far below him. I never saw any of their works either. Of those now alive, some are still advancing, and others have stopped without reaching perfection. If there are any others, I know nothing of them.

As for al-Farabi's surviving works, most of them are on logic. There are many doubtful things in his philosophical writings. In The Excellent Religion he states plainly that the souls of wicked people will suffer everlasting punishment. Yet in his Politics he says just as firmly that they will be dissolved and destroyed, and that only the souls of the perfect will remain forever. And in his Ethics, speaking of human happiness, he says that it exists only in this life, and adds that whatever people say beyond that is nonsense and old wives' tales. If this were believed, everyone would despair of God's mercy, and good and evil would be put on the same level, since destruction would be the common end of both. This is an error that cannot be excused or made up for. Besides all this, he thought little of the gift of prophecy. He said that in his judgment it belongs to the imagination, and that he ranked philosophy above it. He said many other things of the same kind that need not be mentioned here.

As for the books of Aristotle, Ibn Sina's explanation of them in The Healing takes their place, since he followed in the same footsteps and belonged to the same school. At the beginning of that book he says that the truth, in his opinion, is different from what he sets out there, and that he wrote the book according to the philosophy of the Peripatetics, the followers of Aristotle. Those who want to know the truth clearly and without obscurity he refers to his other book, On Eastern Philosophy. Anyone who takes the trouble to compare The Healing with what Aristotle wrote will find that they agree on most points, though The Healing has many things not found in any of Aristotle's works that we have. But if a reader takes only the literal sense of The Healing or of Aristotle, without pushing through to the hidden sense, he will never reach perfection, as Ibn Sina himself remarks in The Healing.

As for al-Ghazali, he often contradicts himself, denying in one place what he affirmed in another. In his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers he accuses the philosophers of heresy because they deny the resurrection of the body and hold that rewards and punishments in the next world belong to the soul alone. Then at the beginning of his Balance he says flatly that this is the doctrine of the Sufis, and that he became convinced it was true after a great deal of study and searching. There are many contradictions like these scattered through his works. He asks pardon for them himself at the end of his Balance of Action, where he says that there are three kinds of opinions. First, those held in common by ordinary people, matching their ideas of things. Second, those we use when we answer questions put to us. Third, the private ones a person holds for himself, which no one understands except those who think exactly as he does. Then he adds that even if his writings did nothing more than make a person doubt what he first absorbed and help him shake off the prejudices of his upbringing, that would be enough. Anyone who never doubts never weighs things properly, and anyone who does not weigh things properly never sees, but stays in blindness and confusion.

     Trust your eyes, but always doubt your ears.
     When the day has come, you will not need starlight.

That is his way of philosophizing. Most of it is riddling and obscure, and so it is useless to anyone except those who already understand the matter thoroughly and then hear it from him a second time, or those with an excellent mind who can grasp a thing from the slightest hint. In his book The Jewels, the same author says that he has books that are not to be shared except with people qualified to read them, and that in these he has laid out the naked truth. As far as we know, none of them ever reached Spain. We have had books that some people imagined were those unshareable ones, but they are wrong. Those are Intellectual Knowledge, The Breathing and the Shaping, and a collection of questions. In these there are some hints, but nothing that helps clear things up beyond what you can find in his other books. There are, it is true, some things in his Highest Aim that go deeper than the rest of his books, but he says outright that this book is not one of the unshareable ones. From this it follows that the books that have come into our hands are not the ones he means.

Some have imagined that great things are contained in the discussion at the end of his Niche for Lights, and this belief has plunged them into endless difficulties. In it he speaks of the various kinds of people who are kept from coming nearer by the dazzling brightness of the divine light, and then of those who have reached the union. Of these last he says that they came to see attributes belonging to the Divine Essence that destroy its unity. From this it seemed to them that he believed in some kind of multiplicity in God, which is horrible blasphemy. I have no doubt that the worthy doctor al-Ghazali was one of those who reached the highest happiness and the heights that belong to those who enjoy the union. But his secret books, the ones that describe how the revelation comes, never reached my hands. The knowledge I have reached I owe to his other works and to Ibn Sina, whom I read and compared with the opinions of the philosophers of my own time, until at last I came to know the truth. At first this came by inquiry and contemplation, but afterward I came to a perfect sense of it, and then I found I could say something I could call my own.

I was determined that you should be the first to hear what I knew about these matters, because of the closeness of our friendship and your openness and honesty. But note this: if I tell you where I ended up, without first proving to you the principles that lead there, it will do you no more good than any other story you take on someone's word, or anything you are told in general terms and do not know how to apply in particular. I hope you will take it kindly, not because the author deserves it, but because of our friendship and acquaintance. And I sincerely hope you will not stop here, but reach for a higher degree. What I offer here cannot bring you to those heights, and it is not enough to save you.

What I want is to lead you along the same paths I walked before you, and have you steer by the same compass until you arrive at the same place and see with your own eyes what I saw before you, so that you no longer take it on trust from me but experience it yourself. But this will take considerable time. It also requires that you be free of all other business and follow it closely, with great effort. If you are really in earnest and set about it wholeheartedly, you will rejoice like a traveler who has walked all night when the sun rises on him. You will be blessed for your labor, and you will delight in your Lord, and he will delight in you. As for me, you will find me just what you would wish, and I hope to lead you in the right way, free from evil and danger. And in fact I already perceive some glimmers, by which I will kindle your desire and set you on this road. I will do it by telling you the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan ("Alive, son of Awake"), Absal, and Salaman, as Ibn Sina tells it. Those who understand themselves rightly will find in it something to learn from and to imitate.

The Story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan

Our righteous forebears, may God be pleased with them, tell of an island in the Indian archipelago, below the equator. It is the island where a human being can come into the world without a mother or a father, and where trees are said to bear women as fruit. It is the island al-Masudi called the island of Waqwaq. The reason such a thing could happen there is that this island has the most balanced climate on earth, and it is the place best prepared to receive the light that shines down from above.

This goes against what most philosophers and the great physicians believe. They hold that the best-balanced region of the inhabited world is the fourth of the seven bands, or "climates," into which the ancients divided it. If they said so because they had good reason to think that no one can live on the equator, since some obstacle of earth or terrain prevents it, then their claim that the fourth climate is the most balanced land can be defended. But if they meant that the equator is scorching hot, as most of them state outright, then they are simply wrong, and there is a proof that shows it.

Here is the proof. The natural sciences have established that heat comes from only three sources: motion, contact with hot bodies, and light. They have also shown that the sun itself is not hot, and has none of the qualities, like hot and cold, that belong to mixed and changeable things. They have shown, too, which bodies take in light best. The best are polished bodies that are not transparent. Next come dense bodies that are not polished. Bodies that are perfectly transparent, with nothing dense in them, take in no light at all.

This last point was proved by Shaykh Abu Ali Ibn Sina, and by him in particular. No one before him had stated it. If these premises hold, it follows that the sun does not warm the earth the way a hot body warms another body it touches, because the sun in itself is not hot. Nor does the earth warm up by moving, because it stands still and is the same when the sun is shining on it as when the sun is away, yet our senses plainly tell us that it heats and cools very differently at those two times.

Nor does the sun heat the air first, and the air then heat the earth. How could it, when we find that the air close to the ground in hot weather is much hotter than the air farther up? What remains is that the sun heats the earth by light and nothing else. Heat always goes with light. Light, when it is intense enough, can even set fire to whatever lies in front of a concave mirror.

The mathematical sciences have shown by conclusive proofs that the sun is a sphere and so is the earth, and that the sun is much larger than the earth. They have shown that the part of the earth lit by the sun at any moment is always more than half of it. And they have shown that this lit half is brightest at its center, because the center is farthest from the dark side and faces more of the sun's surface. The nearer you come to the edge, the dimmer the light, until you reach darkness at the rim of the circle, the place the sun has just left or not yet reached. A place lies at the center of the circle of light when the sun stands straight overhead. Heat there is at its greatest. A place where the sun stays far from overhead is very cold, and a place where the sun is always overhead or nearly so is very hot. Astronomy has shown that the lands along the equator have the sun directly over their heads only twice a year: when it enters the sign of Aries and when it enters the sign of Libra.

The rest of the year the sun is six months to the south of them and six months to the north. So they have neither extreme heat nor extreme cold.

And so their conditions stay much the same all year.

This subject needs more explanation than we can give here, and it is not what we are about. I have mentioned it only because it supports the claim that a human being might come into existence on that island with no mother and no father.

Some people are certain that Hayy ibn Yaqzan was one of those who arose on that island without mother or father. Others deny it, and they tell his story differently. I will pass their account on to you. They say that across from this island lay another, a great island with broad coasts, rich in good things and full of people. It was ruled by a man of fierce pride and jealousy. He had a sister of dazzling beauty. He would not let her marry, because he could find no man good enough for her.

He had a relative named Yaqzan, and Yaqzan married her in secret. It was a marriage the people of that time accepted as valid under the religion they followed.

She became pregnant by him and gave birth to a baby boy.

She was afraid that her secret would come out and she would be disgraced. So she nursed the baby until he was full, then put him in a chest and sealed it tight. Early in the night she went out with a few trusted servants to the seashore. Her heart was burning with love for her child and fear for him. She said goodbye to him and prayed: "O God, You created this child when he was nothing worth mentioning. You fed him in the darkness of the womb and took care of him until he was fully formed. Now I put him in Your gentle care and I hope for Your kindness to him, because I fear this brutal, tyrannical, stubborn king.

So look after him, and do not abandon him, O most merciful of the merciful." Then she threw the chest into the sea.

It happened that the water was running with the force of the incoming tide. It carried the chest that same night to the shore of the other island, the one mentioned earlier.

In those days the tide reached a spot that it has never reached since.

The force of the water pushed the chest into a thicket of tangled trees, with soft, sweet-smelling earth. It was sheltered from wind and rain and hidden from the sun, which leaned away from it when it rose and slanted off when it set.

Then the tide began to go out.

The chest stayed where it was. The wind blew sand over it, and more and more sand piled up until it blocked the way the water had come into the thicket.

So the tide never reached it again. The nails of the chest had been split and its boards knocked loose when the water flung it into the thicket.

When the baby grew very hungry, he cried and called for help and thrashed about. His voice reached the ear of a doe that had lost her fawn. The fawn had wandered from its bed, and an eagle had carried it off. When she heard the crying, she thought it was her young one.

She followed the sound, imagining her fawn, until she reached the chest. She dug at it with her hooves while the child inside cried and groaned, until one board on top of the chest flew off.

The doe felt tender toward him and bent over him with pity. She offered him her teat and gave him sweet milk to drink.

And she kept coming back to look after him and raise him and keep harm away from him.

That is how his life began, according to those who deny that a person can be born from the earth.

Here I will describe how he was brought up, and how he moved from one stage to the next until he reached his great height.

Now for those who say he was born from the earth. They say that in one hollow of that island a bed of clay had been fermenting for ages, year after year. Over that time, hot had mixed with cold and wet with dry, and they had blended in perfect balance, with none stronger than the others.

This fermenting clay was very large, and some parts of it were better balanced than others, and better prepared to produce the mixtures a living body is made of.

The middle part was the best balanced of all, the closest in its blend to the human body. So this clay began to churn. Because it was so sticky, it produced bubbles like those in a boiling pot. In the middle of it there formed a tiny sticky bubble, divided into two chambers by a thin partition. It was filled with a fine, airy substance, balanced as perfectly as such a thing could be. Then the spirit, which comes from the command of God the Most High, attached itself to that substance. It clung to it so tightly that neither the senses nor the mind can tell them apart. For it has been shown that this spirit is always flowing out from God, the Mighty and Majestic, the way sunlight is always flowing out over the world.

Some bodies take no light from the sun at all. These are bodies like perfectly clear air. Some take a little: the dense, unpolished bodies, and these differ in how much they take, and their colors differ accordingly. And some take in as much light as any body can: the polished ones, such as a mirror.

If the mirror is hollow, curved to a particular shape, fire breaks out in it, because the light is so intense.

It is the same with the spirit, which comes from the command of God the Most High. It flows out without end over everything that exists. Some things show no trace of it, because they are not prepared to receive it. These are the lifeless minerals, and they correspond to the air in the example. Some things do show a trace of it. These are the kinds of plants, each according to its readiness, and they correspond to the dense bodies in the example. And some show it very clearly. These correspond to the polished bodies in the example.

Among these polished bodies there are some that do more than take in the sun's light: they reflect the sun's own image, a picture of it. In the same way, among living things there is one that does more than receive the spirit: it mirrors the spirit and takes on its likeness. That one is the human being, and only the human being.

This is what is meant by the saying, "God created Adam in His image."

Now suppose this likeness grows so strong that every other image fades before it and it alone remains, and the blaze of its light burns up everything it meets. Then it is like the mirror turned back on itself, burning everything but itself. This can happen only to the prophets, God's blessings be on them all.

All of this is explained in the places where it belongs. Let us go back to the rest of what these people tell of how that first body took shape.

They say that when the spirit attached itself to that first chamber, every power in the body bowed down to it and submitted, by God's command, in full obedience. Beside that chamber another bubble formed, divided into three chambers, with fine partitions between them and open passages running through. It was filled with the same airy substance that filled the first chamber, only finer.

In these three chambers, which were divided out of one bubble, dwelt a group of the powers that had submitted to the spirit. They were put in charge of guarding the chambers and looking after them, and of reporting everything that happened in them, small or large, to the first spirit, the one attached to the first chamber.

Opposite the first chamber, on the side facing the second, a third bubble formed. It was full of airy substance too, but coarser than the other two. A company of the submitting powers settled in this chamber as well, put in charge of guarding it and looking after it. So these three chambers were the first parts to take shape from the fermenting clay, in the order I have described.

Each needed the others. The first needed the other two the way a master needs servants who work for him.

The other two needed the first the way subordinates need a leader and the governed need a governor. And both of them were leaders, not subordinates, to all the organs that were formed after them.

The second of the two was the more fully a leader than the third. The first chamber took the form of a pine cone, a flame shape, when the spirit attached to it and its heat was kindled. The dense body around it took on its shape, and became firm flesh, and a tough sheath grew around it to protect it. The whole organ was called the heart. Heat causes wasting and dries out moisture, so the heart needed something to supply and feed it, and to replace what was constantly being used up. Otherwise it could not last long. It also needed a way to sense what suited it, so that it could draw that in, and what harmed it, so that it could push that away.

One organ took charge of one of these needs, with the powers in it that came from the heart, and another organ took charge of the other. The organ in charge of sensing was the brain, and the organ in charge of feeding was the liver. Each of them needed the heart to supply it with heat and with the special powers that came from the heart. So passages and channels were woven between them, some wider than others according to what was needed. These were the arteries and the veins.

They went on to describe everything the natural philosophers describe in the formation of a baby in the womb, leaving nothing out, until the body was complete and all the organs finished, and it was at the point where a baby comes out of its mother. To explain how this was completed, they said that the great mass of fermenting clay had been prepared to produce everything a human being needs, including the membranes that wrap the whole body and other things. When the body was finished, these membranes split open around it as they do at birth. The rest of the clay cracked apart, because it had dried out by then.

Then the baby cried for help when his food ran out and his hunger became fierce. And a doe that had lost her fawn answered him.

From this point on, these people and the first group tell the same story about how he was raised. They all say that the doe who took charge of him found rich grass and good pasture. She grew plump and her milk was plentiful, so she fed the child very well.

She stayed with him and left him only when she had to graze.

The child grew so used to the doe that if she was slow to return, he cried hard, and she came flying to him.

There were no fierce beasts of prey on that island. So the child grew and thrived on the doe's milk until he was two years old. He began to walk, step by step, and his teeth came in, and he followed the doe about. She was gentle and kind with him. She carried him to places where fruit trees grew and fed him the sweet ripe fruit that fell from them. If a fruit had a hard shell, she cracked it for him with her back teeth. When he wanted milk again, she gave it to him. When he was thirsty, she brought him water. When the sun was hot, she shaded him. When he was cold, she kept him warm.

At nightfall she took him back to the place where he had first lain, and covered him with her own body and with feathers that had been packed in the chest when the child was first put inside.

As they came and went each day, a herd of deer grew used to them and grazed with them and slept wherever the two of them slept.

The child went on like this among the deer. He copied their calls with his voice until you could hardly tell the difference. He copied all the sounds he heard from birds and other animals in the same way, and very well, because he was so quick to answer what he heard. Best of all he copied the deer: the calls for help, for company, for summoning, and for warding something off.

Animals make different sounds in each of these situations. So the wild animals grew used to him and he to them. They did not shy away from him, and he did not shy away from them.

Then the images of things began to stay in his mind after they were out of his sight. As they did, he began to feel drawn to some things and to dislike others.

All this time he was looking at the animals. He saw that all of them were covered with fur or hair or feathers. He saw how fast they could run and how strong they were, and the weapons they had for defending themselves against anything that attacked: horns, fangs, hooves, spurs and claws.

Then he turned back to himself and saw how bare he was, and how unarmed, how slow at running and how weak. When the animals fought him for the fruit he was gathering, they took it for themselves and beat him to it. He could neither defend himself nor run away from any of them.

He also saw that the young deer his own age were growing horns where they had had none before, and were becoming strong runners after being weak at running.

He saw nothing like that in himself. He thought about this again and again and could not tell what caused it.

He looked at animals with deformities or missing limbs and found none among them that was like himself.

He also looked at the places where animals get rid of waste, and saw that they were covered. The heavier waste came out under their tails, and the lighter kind was hidden under their fur or something like it.

And their private parts were better hidden than his.

All of this troubled him and made him unhappy.

He worried over it for a long time. He was nearly seven years old by now, and he had given up hope that what he lacked would ever be made good. So he took some broad leaves from the trees and put some in front of him and some behind. He made a sort of belt around his waist from rushes and reeds and hung the leaves from it. But before long the leaves withered and dried up and fell off.

He kept making new ones and stitching them together in double layers. That lasted longer, but in the end it lasted only a short time.

He also cut sticks from tree branches, trimmed the ends smooth, and straightened them.

With these he went at the animals that fought him. He attacked the weak ones and stood up to the strong ones. This raised his opinion of himself a little. He saw that his hand was far better than their front feet. With it he had been able to cover himself, and to make sticks to defend his ground. That made up for the tail and the natural weapons he had wanted.

In the meantime he grew, and passed seven years old, and it was tiring work to keep replacing the leaves he used for cover.

So he began to long to take a tail from a dead animal and tie it on himself. But he saw that living animals avoided their dead and ran from them, so he did not dare do it. Then one day he came upon a dead eagle. He felt he had found his way to what he wanted. He seized the chance, since he saw that the animals did not shy away from it. He cut off the eagle's wings and tail whole, just as they were, spread the feathers out and straightened them, and skinned the rest of the bird. He cut the skin in two pieces. He tied one over his back and the other around his navel and the parts below it. He hung the tail behind him and the wings from his upper arms. This gave him cover and warmth, and a fearsome look in the eyes of all the animals, so that they no longer fought him or stood in his way.

After that none of them came near him except the doe who had nursed and raised him. She never left him and he never left her, until she grew old and weak. Then he led her to good pastures and picked sweet fruit for her and fed her.

She kept growing thinner and weaker, until death came for her. Her movements stopped altogether, and all her actions ceased.

When the boy saw her like that, he was terribly distressed. He nearly died of grief for her.

He called her with the sound she always answered, and cried out as loud as he could. But she did not stir or change at all.

He looked into her ears and her eyes and saw no visible injury. He looked over all her limbs in the same way and saw no injury in any of them.

He hoped he might find where the injury was and cure it, so that she would go back to being as she had been. But he found nothing and could do nothing.

What led him to this idea was something he had noticed in himself before. When he shut his eyes or covered them with something, he could not see until the obstruction was removed. When he put his fingers in his ears and blocked them, he could hear nothing until he took them out. And when he held his nose shut with his hand, he could smell nothing until he opened it.

So he came to believe that each of his powers of sensing and acting might be blocked by something, and that when the block was removed the power would return.

He looked over all her outer parts and saw no visible injury. Yet he saw that the stillness had taken hold of all of her, not one part more than another. So it occurred to him that whatever had struck her must be some organ hidden from sight, tucked away inside the body. And no other outer part could do that organ's work in its place.

When the injury struck that organ, the harm spread through the whole body and the stillness took hold of everything. He hoped that if he could find that organ and remove whatever was wrong with it, all would be put right, its benefit would flow out again through the rest of the body, and everything would work as before.

He had seen before, in the dead bodies of animals, that all their parts were solid, with hollow spaces only in the skull, the chest and the belly.

So it came to him that the organ he was looking for had to be in one of these three places. He was fairly sure it was in the middle one of the three. For it had settled in his mind that all the other organs need this one, and that its home must therefore be in the center.

When he turned to himself, he also felt something like this organ in his chest. He could imagine parting from any of his other limbs, such as the hand, the foot, the ear, the nose or the eye, and it seemed to him he would get along without them. He imagined the same about his head, and thought he could do without it. But when he thought of the thing he felt in his chest, he could not imagine doing without it for the blink of an eye.

That is why, when he fought the animals, he guarded his chest most of all against their horns. He was aware of the something inside it.

So when he was sure that the organ that had been struck was in her chest, he made up his mind to search for it and dig it out, hoping to find it, see what was wrong with it, and cure it. Then he was afraid that the act of doing this might be worse than the injury she already had, and that he would only make things worse for her.

Then he thought: had he ever seen any animal in this state come back to how it was before? He found none. From this he gave up hope that she would recover if he left her alone. But he still had a little hope that she might come back if he found that organ and cured what was wrong with it.

So he decided to cut open her chest and search inside. He took sharp splinters of hard stone and slivers of dry cane and made them into something like knives. With these he cut between her ribs, through the flesh between them, until he reached the membrane lining the ribs. He found it strong. That made him more sure that such a membrane must be there only for the sake of an organ like the one he wanted. He hoped that once he was through it, he would find what he was after. He tried to cut it, but it was hard, because he had no proper tools, only stone and cane. So he sharpened them again, and worked carefully at the membrane until it broke open for him. Then he came to the lung. He thought it was what he was looking for, and kept turning it over, searching it for the injury.

At first he looked at the half of it on the one side.

When he saw that it leaned to one side, he remembered his belief that the organ he wanted must be in the middle, across the width of the body as well as along its length.

So he kept searching in the middle of the chest until he found the heart. It was wrapped in an extremely strong sheath and tied down with the strongest bands. The lung was wrapped around it on the side where he had started cutting. He said to himself: "If this organ has the same on the other side as it has on this one, then it is truly in the middle, and it must be what I'm looking for.

Especially since I can see how well it is placed, how beautifully shaped, how compact, how firm its flesh is, and how it is guarded by a membrane like none I have seen on any other organ."

He examined the other side of the chest and found the same membrane lining the ribs, and found the lung there just as it was on this side.

So he decided that this organ was what he was looking for. He tried to tear its covering and open its sheath, and after much effort and struggle, using all his strength, he managed it.

He stripped the heart bare and found it solid on every side. He looked to see whether he could see any visible injury on it. He saw nothing. Then he squeezed it in his hand and found that it had a hollow inside. He said: "Perhaps what I'm really looking for is inside this organ, and so far I have not reached it."

He cut it open and found two hollows in it, one on the right side and one on the left. The one on the right was full of clotted blood. The one on the left was empty, with nothing in it.

He said: "What I'm looking for must live in one of these two rooms."

Then he said: "As for this room on the right, I see nothing in it but this clotted blood.

It surely did not clot until the whole body came to this state. I have seen that blood, when it flows out, clots and sets, and this was only blood like any other. And I see that this blood is found in all the other organs, not in one more than another. What I am looking for is not anything of that kind. I am looking for the thing that belongs to this place alone, the place I cannot do without for the blink of an eye, the thing that first set me on this search.

As for this blood, how many times have the animals wounded me in fights and I lost a great deal of it? It did not hurt me or take anything away from what I could do. So this room is not where what I'm looking for lives.

And the room on the left I see is empty, with nothing in it. I do not think it is empty for no reason, because I have seen that every organ is there for some work that belongs to it alone. How could this room, which I have seen to be so noble, be there for nothing? I can only think that what I was looking for was in it! And it has moved out and left it empty.

That is when this body suffered what it suffered. It lost all awareness and all movement."

When he saw that the one who lived in that room had left before it was destroyed, and had left it as it was, he understood that it was even less likely to return after the ruin and the tearing that had since been done to it.

So the whole body became worthless in his eyes, of no account beside the thing he had come to believe dwelt in it for a time and then left.

He turned all his thought to that thing. What was it? What was it like? What had tied it to this body? Where had it gone? Which door did it leave by when it left the body? If it went unwillingly, what drove it out? If it left by choice, what made it hate the body enough to leave it? His mind was pulled in all these directions at once, and he lost interest in the body and threw it aside. He understood that his mother, who had felt tender toward him and had nursed him, had been that departed thing, and that all those deeds had come from it, not from this idle body. He saw that the body as a whole was only a tool, like the sticks he had made himself to fight the animals.

So his attachment moved from the body to the one who owned the body and moved it, and his longing was for that one alone.

In the meantime the body began to rot and to give off a foul smell. That made him turn away from it more, and he wished never to see it. Then his eye fell on two ravens fighting. They fought until one struck the other down dead.

Then the living one began to scratch at the ground until it had dug a hole, and it buried the dead one in it with earth. The boy said to himself: "How well this raven has done to bury its companion's corpse, even though it did wrong to kill him! And I was more in need of finding out how to do this than it was, for my mother!" So he dug a hole and laid his mother's body in it and threw earth over her.

He went on thinking about the thing that had moved and driven the body, not knowing what it was. But he looked at all the deer and saw that they had his mother's shape and form. So he felt fairly sure that each of them was also moved and driven by a thing like the thing that had moved and driven his mother. For that reason he felt at home among the deer and was drawn to them, because of the likeness.

He went on like this for some time. He looked over the kinds of animals and plants and roamed the shore of the island, looking to see whether he could find anything like himself, as he saw that each animal and plant had many others like it. He found nothing.

He also saw that the sea surrounded the island on every side, and so he believed that there was no land in existence except his own island.

Then one day it happened that a fire broke out in a thicket of reeds, when the reeds rubbed together in the wind.

When he saw it, he was struck with awe at the sight, unlike anything he had known. He stood there marveling at it for a long time, and crept closer and closer. He saw how the fire pierced with its light and overpowered whatever it touched. Whatever it caught hold of, it consumed and changed into itself. His wonder at it, and the boldness and strength that God the Most High had built into his nature, moved him to reach out his hand to it. He wanted to take some of it. But as soon as he touched it, it burned his hand and he could not hold it. Then he found that he could pick up a branch that the fire had not yet taken all over. He took it by the unburned end with the fire at the other end. That worked, and he carried it to the place where he lived. He had been living for some time in a hole he had found and liked as a home.

After that he kept feeding the fire with grass and heavy logs, and tended it night and day, because he loved it and wondered at it.

He liked it most at night, because it did the sun's work for him, giving light and warmth. His love for it grew deep, and he judged it the best thing he had. He always saw it moving upward and reaching for the heights, so he was fairly sure that it belonged among the heavenly substances he could see in the sky.

He tested its power on everything by throwing things into it. He saw that it overpowered each one, quickly or slowly depending on how ready the thing was to burn, or how resistant.

Among the things he threw in to test its power was a sea creature the sea had cast up on the shore. When the fire had cooked it and its savory smell rose up, he felt his appetite stir. He ate some of it and found it good. That is how he got into the habit of eating meat. He put his skill to hunting on land and in the sea, until he became an expert.

His love of the fire grew, because it gave him good food in a way he had never had before.

His passion for the fire became intense, because of its many fine effects and its great power. And it came to his mind that the thing that had left the heart of his mother the doe, who had brought him up, was of the same substance as this fire, or of something like it. Several things made him more sure of this. He had seen that animals are warm as long as they live and cold after they die, and that this never changes. He also felt a strong heat in his own chest, just where he had cut open the doe. So it came to him that if he took a living animal and cut open its heart, and looked at that hollow which he had found empty in his mother the doe, he would see it in the living animal full of that thing which lived in it. He could then find out whether it was made of fire, and whether it had any light or heat in it, or not. So he picked out one of the wild animals, tied it up firmly, and cut it open the same way he had cut the doe, until he reached the heart.

First he went to its left side and cut it open. He saw that the hollow was full of an airy vapor, like white mist. He put a finger into it and found it so hot that it nearly burned him. The animal died on the spot.

Then it was clear to him that this hot vapor was what had moved the animal, that every animal has the same in it, and that once it leaves the animal, the animal dies.

Then a longing stirred in him to study the rest of the animal's organs: how they are arranged, where they lie, how many there are, how they are joined to one another, how they draw on this hot vapor so that life goes on through it, how long the vapor lasts and why it lasts that long, where it draws its supply from, and how its heat never runs out. He pursued all of this by dissecting animals, both living and dead. He never stopped looking closely and thinking hard until he reached the level of the great natural philosophers. He came to see that every animal, however many organs it has and however varied its senses and movements, is one thing through that single spirit, which begins in one chamber and spreads out from it into all the organs.

He saw that all the organs serve that spirit or carry out its work. The spirit's place in running the body is like that of a man fighting enemies with full weapons, and hunting all the game of land and sea. For each kind of game he provides a tool to hunt it with. And the weapons he fights with fall into two kinds: those for guarding against another's blows, and those for striking another.

The hunting tools likewise fall into two kinds: those that suit sea animals and those that suit land animals. And the tools the man cuts with fall into kinds too: those good for cutting, those good for breaking, and those good for piercing. Yet the body is one, and it uses each tool in the way that suits it, and for the ends it is aiming at.

It is the same with the animal spirit. It is one. When it works through the tool of the eye, its action is seeing. When it works through the ear, its action is hearing. When it works through the nose, its action is smelling. When it works through the tongue, its action is tasting. When it works through the skin and flesh, its action is touch. When it works through the limbs, its action is movement. When it works through the liver, its action is feeding and being fed.

Each of these has organs that serve it.

None of them can do its work except by what reaches it from that spirit, along the channels called nerves.

When those channels are cut or blocked, that organ stops working.

These nerves draw the spirit from the chambers of the brain, and the brain draws it from the heart. The brain holds a great deal of spirit, because many branches are divided out from it there. So any organ that lacks this spirit, for whatever reason, stops working and becomes like a discarded tool, one that its owner might still hold but can no longer use.

And if the spirit leaves the body altogether, or is used up, or breaks apart in any way, the whole body stops working and passes into death. By the time he had worked all this out, from the day he began, he was twenty-one years old.

During these years he grew clever in many ways. He clothed himself in the skins of the animals he had dissected and wore their hides on his feet. He made thread from hair and from the bark of marshmallow, mallow and hemp, and from every fibrous plant.

He had first come to this by taking some rushes and making hooks from strong thorns and cane sharpened on stones.

He learned to build from watching what swallows did. He made a storehouse, a place to keep his extra food, and fortified it with a door of cane tied together, so that no animal could get at it when he was away on some errand.

He tamed birds of prey to help him hunt, and kept poultry for their eggs and chicks. From the horns of wild cattle he made something like spearheads. He fixed them onto strong canes and onto poles of beech and other woods, using fire and the edges of stones, until they were something like lances. He made a shield of layered hides. He did all this because he saw that he had no natural weapons.

By now his hands could make up for everything nature had left him without. But there was still one problem. No animal of any kind could stand against him, yet they could all get away from him, and their speed made him helpless to catch them. So he thought about how to get around this. The best answer he could find was to tame some of the fastest animals, the ones that were hardest to outrun, and to win them over by feeding them the food that suited them, until he could ride them and chase down the other kinds.

The island had wild horses and wild asses. He picked out the ones that suited him and trained them until they did everything he wanted. From cords and hides he made things like bridles and saddles. Now he could catch the animals that had been so hard to trap.

He came up with all of these ideas during the years he spent on dissection, when he was hungry to understand how the parts of an animal's body differ and what each one is specially for. That whole stretch of time, as we said, ended when he was twenty-one.

After that he moved on to other kinds of inquiry. He went through every body in the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, the world where things are born and then fall apart. That meant animals of every kind, plants, minerals, every sort of stone and soil, water, steam, snow, hail, smoke, flame, and glowing coals. He saw that they had many qualities, that they acted in different ways, and that their motions sometimes agreed and sometimes clashed. He looked into all this carefully and patiently. He saw that they share some qualities and differ in others. Where they share a quality, they are one; where they differ, they are separate and many. Sometimes he studied what makes each thing special, what one thing has that another lacks, and then things multiplied in his mind past any counting. The whole of existence spread out before him and would not be pinned down.

He looked at any single part of any of them and saw that it could be divided into a great many smaller parts. So he judged that his own self was many, and so was the self of everything else.

Then he came back to the same question from a second direction. He saw that his own parts, though many, are all joined to one another, with no break between them anywhere, so that in effect they are one. They differ only in what they do, and that difference comes only from the power that reaches each part from the animal spirit, the very thing his inquiry had led him to at the start. This spirit is one in itself, and it is what a creature really is; all the other organs are like its tools. So by this route his own self became one.

Then he turned to all the kinds of animals and saw, by the same way of thinking, that each individual is one.

Next he took a single species, gazelles, say, or horses, or one kind of bird after another. He saw that the individuals within a species resemble one another in their outer and inner parts, in their senses, their movements, and their instincts. Whatever differences there were counted for little next to everything they had in common.

So he judged that the spirit of a whole species is one thing. It only seems divided because it is spread across many hearts. If you could gather everything that was scattered among those hearts and pour it into a single vessel, it would all be one thing, like water or a drink that is poured out into many cups and then poured back together.

Whether it is spread out or gathered, it is the same thing. It only looks many in some limited way. So by this way of looking he saw the species as one, and he treated the many individuals as he had treated the many organs of a single body: their number was not real multiplicity.

Then he called to mind all the species of animals at once and thought about them. He saw that they all agree in these things: they feel, they take in food, and they move where they choose, in whatever direction they like. He already knew that these are the most characteristic works of the animal spirit, and that the other things in which species differ, once you set these common ones aside, do not belong so closely to the animal spirit.

This thinking showed him that the animal spirit shared by the whole animal kingdom is really one, though it has small differences that belong to one species and not another. It is like a single body of water divided among many vessels, some of it colder than the rest.

At its root it is one. Whatever falls in the same band of coldness corresponds to the animal spirit marked out for one species, even if it has been divided in some way. So by this way of looking he saw the whole animal kingdom as one.

Then he went back to the plants, in all their variety.

He saw that in each kind the individuals resemble each other in branches, leaves, flowers, fruit, and behavior. He compared plants with animals. He understood that a plant has one thing in it that plays the part the animal spirit plays in an animal, and that by this one thing the plant is one.

He looked at the whole plant kingdom in the same way and judged it to be one, because he saw that all plants act alike in feeding themselves and growing.

Then he put the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom together in his mind. He saw that they agree in feeding and growing, and that animals have more: feeling, awareness, and movement. Something like these does sometimes show up in plants, such as the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun and the way roots reach toward food. He decided that both kingdoms share one thing. In one of them it is more complete and fuller, and in the other something holds it back. It is like one body of water split into two parts, one frozen solid and the other flowing. In this way plants and animals became one for him.

Next he considered the bodies that do not feel, do not feed, and do not grow: stones, earth, water, air, flame. He saw that they are all bodies with length, width, and depth, and that they differ only in things like this: some have color and some have none, some are hot and some are cold. He also saw that what is hot can turn cold and what is cold can turn hot. He saw water become steam and steam become water. He saw burning things turn into coals, ash, flame, and smoke. And when smoke rises and meets a stone vault, it thickens there and becomes like the other earthy things. This thinking showed him that all of them are really one thing. If many-ness comes over them in some way, it does so just as it came over animals and plants.

Then he looked at the thing that had made plants and animals one for him. He saw that it too is some kind of body like these others, with length, width, and depth, and either hot or cold, like any of those bodies that do not feel or feed. It differs from them only in the actions that show themselves through animal and plant organs, and nothing else. Perhaps those actions do not belong to it at all. Perhaps they flow into it from something else, and if they flowed into those other bodies, those bodies would be just like it. So he looked at it by itself, stripped of those actions that seem, at first glance, to come from it, and he saw that it was nothing but one more body among bodies. From this he concluded that all bodies are one thing, living and lifeless, moving and still. Some of them seem to have actions that they carry out through organs, but he could not tell whether those actions belong to them or flow into them from somewhere else.

At this stage he saw nothing but bodies. So by this road he saw all of existence as one thing, while by his first way of looking he had seen countless, unbounded multiplicity.

He stayed in this state for some time.

Then he considered all bodies again, the living and the lifeless.

To him they were at one moment a single thing and at another an endless crowd. He saw that every one of them must do one of two things. Either it moves upward, like smoke, flame, and air trapped under water, or it moves the opposite way, downward, like water and the parts of animals and plants. No body is ever free of both of these motions. It stays still only when something blocks its path. A falling stone meets the hard surface of the earth and cannot break through it; but it would not turn aside from its motion if it could, as far as he could see. That is why, when you lift a stone, you find it pressing against your hand with its pull downward, trying to fall.

Smoke rising is the same. It never turns aside unless it meets a solid vault that holds it back. Then it bends to the right and left. As soon as it gets clear of the vault, it pushes on up through the air, because the air cannot hold it back.

He also saw that when a leather bag is filled with air, tied shut, and pushed under water, the air tries to rise. It pushes against whoever holds it under, and it keeps doing so until it reaches the place where air belongs, which means coming out from under the water. Then it rests, and the pushing and the pull upward that it had before stop.

Then he looked to see whether he could find any body that lacked both of these motions, or the leaning toward one of them, at any moment. He did not find one among the bodies around him. He looked for it because he hoped to find one. Then he could see the nature of body as body, with none of the qualities attached to it that are the source of all that multiplicity.

When that search wore him out, he turned to the bodies that carry the fewest qualities. Even those were never free of one of these two qualities, which people describe as heaviness and lightness. So he asked whether heaviness and lightness belong to a body just because it is a body, or to something added on top of being a body. He saw that they must be something added, because if they belonged to body as body, every body would always have both.

But we find that a heavy thing has no lightness in it and a light thing has no heaviness, and both are certainly bodies. So each has something that belongs to it alone and that the other lacks, something over and above being a body.

That something is what makes each of them different from the other. Without it they would be the same thing in every way.

So he saw that what each heavy or light thing really is has two parts. One part is shared by both, and that is being a body. The other is what belongs to each alone: heaviness in one, lightness in the other, each joined to the body-part. This is the part that moves one of them upward and the other downward.

He looked the same way at every other kind of body, lifeless and living, and saw that what each one truly is is made of the body-part and something else added on top, sometimes one thing and sometimes more. So the forms of bodies, in all their variety, came into view. This was the first glimpse he had of the world of spirit, because forms cannot be perceived by the senses. They can only be grasped by a kind of thinking of the mind.

Among the things that came into view was this. The animal spirit, which lives in the heart (the one described at the start), must also have something added on top of being a body. That added thing is what lets it do its strange and special work: all its kinds of feeling, its many kinds of awareness, and its movements. This added thing is its form, the extra that sets it apart from every other body. The thinkers call it the animal soul.

The same goes for the thing that does for a plant what the natural heat does for an animal. It has something of its own, which is its form, and which the thinkers call the plant soul.

The same goes for all lifeless bodies, meaning everything in the world of coming-to-be and passing-away except animals and plants. Each has something of its own, by which it does what it specially does, such as its kinds of motion and the qualities we sense in it. That something is the form of each one, and the thinkers call it its nature.

By this thinking he came to see that the animal spirit, the thing he had always longed to understand, is made of the body-part and something else added on top. The body-part is shared with all other bodies, and the other part is joined to it and belongs to the spirit alone. Now the body-part seemed to him cheap, and he set it aside. His mind held on to the second part, which is what people call the soul. He longed to know it truly and gave himself to thinking about it. He decided to begin by going through all bodies, not as bodies, but as things that have forms, and from those forms come the special properties by which they are told apart.

He followed this through and mapped it out in his mind. He saw a large group of bodies that share one form, and from that form comes some action or actions. He saw one branch of that group that shares that form with the whole group but adds a further form, from which something more comes. And he saw a smaller circle within that branch that shares the first and second forms with the branch but adds a third form, from which come actions special to it.

Here is an example. Earthy bodies, such as soil, stones, minerals, plants, animals, and all other heavy bodies, make up one group. They share a single form, and from it comes the motion downward, unless something blocks their fall. If they are forced upward and then let go, they move downward by their own form.

Part of this group, the plants and animals, shares that form with the whole group, but adds another form from which come feeding and growth.

Feeding means this: the one who feeds replaces what has worn away from it by changing nearby material into something like its own substance and drawing it in.

Growth means movement in all three dimensions, keeping the same proportion between length, width, and depth.

These two actions belong to both plants and animals, and they clearly come from a form the two share, which is called the plant soul.

A smaller circle within this branch, the animals alone, shares the first and second forms with the branch but adds a third, from which come sensation and moving from place to place at will.

He also saw that each species of animal has some special trait that sets it apart from all the other species and makes it stand out from them.

So he knew that this comes from a form of its own, over and above the form it shares with the rest of the animal kingdom. Each species of plant is the same.

So it became clear to him that among the sensible bodies in the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, some have a nature made up of many things added to being a body, and some are made of fewer. He knew that it is easier to understand what has fewer parts than what has many. So he decided to first find out the truth about whatever is made of the fewest things. He saw that plants and animals are made only of many things, because their actions are so varied, so he put off thinking about their forms.

In the same way he saw that some parts of the earth are simpler than others, so he aimed at the simplest he could reach. He saw that water is a thing of little complexity, since so few actions come from its form, and likewise fire and air.

He had already suspected that these four turn into one another, and that they share one thing, which is being a body. That thing must be empty of all the qualities that set each of the four apart from the others. So it cannot move upward or downward. It cannot be hot or cold, or wet or dry, because none of these qualities belongs to all bodies, and so none of them belongs to a body just as a body.

So suppose a body could exist with no form added to bodily-ness. It would have none of these qualities. It could have only qualities that are found in all bodies, whatever their forms.

So he asked whether he could find any one quality that is common to all bodies, living and lifeless. He found nothing that belongs to every body.

Except one thing: the stretching-out found in all of them in the three directions we call length, width, and depth. He knew that this belongs to body as body. But his senses could never show him a body that had only this quality, with nothing added to the stretching-out, and with no forms at all.

Then he thought about this stretching-out in three directions. Is it the very being of a body, with nothing else behind it? Or is there something else? He saw that behind this stretching there is something else, the thing in which the stretching is found. The stretching alone cannot stand by itself, just as the stretched thing cannot exist without stretching.

He tested this on one of the sensible bodies that has a form, clay for example. It had some length, width, and depth, of a certain size.

Then suppose you take that same ball and reshape it into a cube or an egg. The length, the width, and the depth all change, and it takes on a different size.

It is different from what it was, but the clay is the very same clay and has not changed. Still, it must have some length, width, and depth, of whatever size, and it can never be without them. Because they replace one another in it, he saw that they are a separate thing. Because the clay can never be entirely without them, he saw that they belong to what it really is.

By this test it became clear to him that a body as a body is really made of two things. One plays the part of the clay in this example.

The other plays the part of the ball's length, width, and depth, or the cube's, or whatever shape it has.

He saw that a body can only be understood as made of these two, and that neither can do without the other.

But the one that can change and take on many shapes in turn, which is the stretching-out, resembles the form of all bodies that have forms. The one that stays the same, which stands in the place of the clay in the example, resembles the bodily-ness of all bodies that have forms.

This thing that is like the clay in the example is what the thinkers call matter, or hyle, and matter by itself is entirely bare of form.

When his thinking reached this point, he had left the world of the senses part of the way behind and was standing at the borders of the world of the mind. He grew uneasy there and longed for the familiar world of the senses. So he stepped back a little and let go of body in the abstract, since the senses cannot perceive it and cannot get hold of it.

He took the simplest sensible bodies he had seen, the four his thought had settled on.

First he looked at water. He saw that when it is left alone and does what its form requires, it feels cold and tries to sink. When it is heated, either by fire or by the sun's warmth, the coldness goes first and the pull downward stays. When it is heated too much, the pull downward goes too.

And it starts to go up.

So both of the qualities that always came from its form were gone, and he had known nothing about its form except that these two acts came from it.

When those two acts ended, the rule of that form ended. The form of water had left that body. Acts that belong to some other form appeared in it, and another form had come into being that was not there before. By it the body did things it could not have done with its first form.

So he knew that anything that comes to be must have someone who brings it to be.

By this reasoning there took shape in his mind, in a general way and without details, a Doer of forms, someone who makes forms.

Then he went back over the forms he had already seen, one by one. He saw that they had all come to be, and that each must have had a maker.

Then he looked at the forms themselves. He saw that a form is nothing more than a body's readiness to have a certain act come from it. Water is an example. When it is heated too far, it becomes ready to move upward and fit for it.

That readiness is its form, since all that is there is a body and certain things that can be sensed in it that were not there before. So a body's fitness for some motions and not others, its readiness, is its form. He saw the same thing in every form. So it became clear to him that the acts that come out of forms do not really belong to the forms. They belong to one who acts through them, and every act attributed to them is his. This meaning that came to him is the same as the words of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him: "I was his hearing, with which he hears, and his sight, with which he sees." And in the wise Book: "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. You did not kill them; God killed them. And you did not throw when you threw; God threw." God has spoken truly.

Once this Doer had shown himself to him in this general way without details, an urgent longing arose in him to know him in detail. Since he had not yet left the world of the senses behind, he began searching for this Doer among sensible things. He did not yet know whether the Doer was one or many. So he went through all the bodies around him, which had always been the subject of his thoughts. He saw that they all come to be at one time and pass away at another. Where he could not find the destruction of a whole thing, he found the destruction of its parts, as with water and earth. He saw parts of them destroyed by fire. He saw air destroyed by hard cold, until it turns to snow and melts into water.

It was the same with all the other bodies he had. He did not find any of them free of coming into being, or free of needing a Doer who chooses. So he set them all aside, and his thought moved on to the heavenly bodies.

He reached this point in his thinking at the end of four weeks of years from his birth, which is twenty-eight years.

He knew that the sky and the stars in it are bodies, since they stretch out in three directions, length, width, and depth, and none of them is free of this. Whatever is not free of this is a body, so they are all bodies.

Then he wondered whether they stretch out without end, going on forever in length, width, and depth, or whether they are finite and limited by boundaries where they stop, with no stretching-out beyond. This puzzled him for a while.

Then, by the strength of his nature and the sharpness of his mind, he saw that a body with no limit is false, impossible, and something the mind cannot make sense of. Many arguments came to him alone with his own thoughts and made this judgment stronger. He said: The body of the heavens is limited on the side facing me, the side my senses can reach. There is no doubt about that, because I see it with my own eyes. As for the opposite side, where I feel doubt, I also know it cannot stretch on forever. Suppose I picture two lines starting from this limited side and running through the depth of the body without end, as far as the body extends. Then suppose I picture that a large piece is cut from one of the two lines at its limited end, and that what remains of it is laid over the line that was not cut. My mind follows both lines out toward the side said to be endless. There are two possibilities. Either both lines keep running on without end and neither falls short of the other, so that the one with the piece cut off would be equal to the one with nothing cut off. That is impossible, just as a whole cannot equal its part. Or the shortened line does not keep going alongside the other, but breaks off short of where the other goes and stops, so that it is finite. Then if we put back the piece that was cut from it, which was also finite, the whole line is finite too. It then falls no shorter than the other line, and is no longer than it, so it equals the other, and the other is also finite. Then the body in which we picture these lines is finite. And every body can have these lines pictured in it, so every body is finite.

So if we suppose a body without limit, we have supposed something false and impossible.

Once he was sure, by the remarkable mind he had for questions like this, that the body of the heavens is finite, he wanted to know what shape it has and how it is cut off by the surfaces that bound it.

First he looked at the sun, the moon, and the other stars. He saw that they all rise on the eastern side and set on the western side. Those that pass straight over his head, he saw, cut across in a great circle. Those that lean off to the north or the south of straight overhead cut a smaller circle than that.

And the farther a star was from straight overhead on either side, the smaller its circle was than the circle of one nearer.

In the end the smallest circles the stars move in were two: one around the south pole, the circle of the star Canopus, and the other around the north pole, the circle of the two bright stars of the Little Bear.

Since his home was right on the equator, as we described at the start, all these circles stood upright on the horizon.

They looked alike in the south and the north. Both poles were visible to him at once. He would watch as one star rose along a big circle and another rose along a small one. If they rose together, he saw that they set together.

This held for all the stars and at all times. So it became clear to him that the heavens are shaped like a ball. He grew more sure of it by what he saw: the sun, the moon, and the other stars come back to the east after setting in the west. He also saw that they look to be the same size to his eye when rising, at the highest point, and setting. If their path were not a ball's, then at some moments they would surely be nearer his eye than at others. And if they were, their sizes would look different to him, larger when close and smaller when far, because their distances from where he stood would differ, unlike what he had first supposed.

Since none of this happened, he became certain the shape is a ball.

He kept on studying the motion of the moon. He saw it going from west to east, and the wandering stars the same way. Little by little a good deal of the science of the heavens became clear to him. He saw that their motion cannot happen except through many spheres, all set inside one sphere, the highest of them.

That highest one moves them all from east to west in a day and a night.

He worked out how the spheres move.

Explaining it all would take too long. It is set down in books, and for our purpose we need only as much as we have given.

By now he had come to know that the heavens, taken as a whole with everything in them, are like one thing joined together part to part. All the bodies he had studied at the beginning, earth, water, air, plants, animals, and the like, are inside it and none of them is outside it. He saw that the whole is very much like a single animal. The shining stars in it are like an animal's senses. The many spheres, joined one to another, are like an animal's limbs. And what goes on inside it, the coming-to-be and passing-away, is like what is inside an animal's body: the various waste matter and fluids, in which living things often form, just as they form in the greater world.

When it became clear to him that it is all like one single body in truth, and its many parts had become one for him by the same kind of thinking that had made one of the bodies in the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, he thought about the world as a whole. Did it come into being after not being, stepping into existence out of nothing? Or has it always existed, so that nothing ever came before it? He wavered over this, and neither answer won out over the other in his mind.

The reason was this. Whenever he was about to settle on the belief that the world has always existed, many obstacles stood in his way. One was that something without a beginning cannot exist, by the same reasoning that had shown him a body with no limit was impossible. Another was that this world is never free of things that come to be, so it cannot have come before them, and whatever cannot come before things that come to be must itself have come to be.

And whenever he was about to settle on the belief that it came into being, other obstacles stood in his way. He saw that "it came to be after not having been" can only be understood to mean that time came before it. But time is part of the world and cannot be separated from it. So it makes no sense to say the world came later than time.

He also used to say: If it came to be, it must have someone who made it come to be. Why did this maker make it now, and not earlier? Was it because something new came over him, when nothing else existed besides him? Or because a change happened in his own being? If so, what caused the change? He kept thinking about this for several years.

The arguments pulled against each other in his mind, and neither belief pulled ahead.

When this wore him out, he began to ask what follows from each of the two beliefs. Perhaps what follows from both would turn out to be the same thing.

He saw that if he believed the world came to be, stepping into existence after not existing, then this must follow: it could not have brought itself into being, and it must have a maker who brought it into being. That maker cannot be perceived by any of the senses. If a sense could perceive him, he would be one of the bodies, and if he were one of the bodies, he would be part of the world, would have come to be, and would need someone to make him. If that second maker were also a body, he would need a third, and the third a fourth, and so on without end, which is false.

So the world must have a maker who is not a body. If he is not a body, no sense can reach him, because the five senses perceive nothing but bodies. And if he cannot be sensed, he cannot be pictured, because picturing is nothing but calling up the images of things we sense when they are not in front of us. If he is not a body, then every quality of bodies is impossible for him. The first quality of bodies is stretching out in length, width, and depth, and he is far above that, and above everything that follows from it among the qualities of bodies.

And if he made the world, then he certainly has power over it and knowledge of it. "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Does He not know what He created, when He is the Subtle, the All-Aware?" God has spoken truly.

He also saw that if he believed instead that the world has always existed, that nothing came before it, and that it has always been as it is now, then this must follow: its motion has always existed, with no beginning, since no stillness came before it for the motion to start from. Every motion must have a mover. That mover is either a power that runs through some body, either the body of the moving thing itself or some other body outside it, or a power that does not run through or spread through any body.

Any power that runs through a body and spreads through it is divided when the body is divided and multiplied when the body is multiplied. Heaviness in a stone is an example.

It is what moves a stone downward.

If you split the stone in two, the heaviness is split in two.

And if you add another stone like it, another such heaviness is added. So if a stone could grow without end, its heaviness would grow without end. And if a stone reaches some size and stops, its heaviness reaches that size and stops. But it has already been proved that every body is finite. So every power in a body is certainly finite.

If we find a power that does something without end, that power is not in a body. And we find that the heavens move forever, with a motion that has no end and no break, if we suppose them to have always existed, with no beginning. So the power that moves them must be neither in their own body nor in any body outside them.

So it belongs to something free of bodies, that has none of the qualities of a body. In his first study of the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, he had already seen that what a body truly is comes from its form, which is its readiness for various motions, and that the existence it has from its matter is faint, barely to be detected. So the existence of the whole world comes only from its readiness to be moved by this mover, who is free of matter and of the qualities of bodies, and too high for any sense to perceive or any image to reach, glory be to Him. And if He is the doer of the motions of the heavens, in all their kinds, doing it without unevenness, without weakness, without any falling short, then He certainly has power over them and knowledge of them.

So his thinking arrived by this road where it had arrived by the first road. His doubt about whether the world had a beginning or not did not hurt him at all. On either view he was sure that there is a Doer who is not a body, not joined to a body or separate from it, not inside it or outside it. For joined, separate, inside, and outside are words that belong to bodies, and He is above them.

Matter in every body needs form, since it cannot stand without it and has no reality without it. And form can only exist by the act of this Doer. So it became clear to him that all existing things need this Doer for their existence, and that nothing stands except through Him. So He is the cause of them, and they are caused by Him. It makes no difference whether they came to be after nothing came before them, or whether their beginning is only in the sense of time and nothing ever came before them. In both cases they are caused, in need of the Doer, and their existence hangs on Him. If He did not last, they would not last. If He did not exist, they would not exist. If He were not eternal, they would not be eternal. And He in Himself needs nothing from them and is free of them. How could He not be, when it has been proved that His power has no limit, and that all bodies and everything joined to them or hanging on them, even in the smallest way, are finite and come to an end?

So the whole world, with the heavens and the earth and the stars, and what lies between them and above them and below them, is His act and His creation. It comes after Him in essence, even if it does not come after Him in time.

It is like holding an object in your fist and moving your hand. The object has to move along with your hand. Its movement comes after your hand's movement, and it depends on it, even though the two do not happen one after the other in time. They begin together. The whole world is like that object. It is caused and created by the Maker, and it comes from Him without any gap in time. As God says: "His command, when He wants something, is only to say to it, 'Be,' and it is." God has spoken the truth.

Now that Hayy saw that everything that exists is the Maker's doing, he went back over it all, item by item. This time he looked in the spirit of someone reading signs, marveling at the power of the One who made these things, at the strangeness of His craftsmanship, the subtlety of His wisdom, and the fineness of His knowledge. Even in the smallest things that exist, never mind the greatest, he found so many traces of wisdom and wonders of workmanship that he was struck with amazement. It became certain to him that such things could only come from a Maker who acts by choice, and who is perfect beyond perfection. "Not even the weight of an atom escapes Him, in the heavens or on the earth, nor anything smaller than that or larger." God has spoken the truth.

Then he thought about every kind of animal. He saw how "He gave everything its nature, and then guided it." God has spoken the truth. If God had not guided each animal to use the organs He made for it, for the purposes they were meant to serve, the animal would get no good from them. They would be a burden on it. From this he understood that the Maker is the most generous of the generous and the most merciful of the merciful.

All of this overflows from that Maker, who chooses freely, may His majesty be exalted. It comes from His being and from His act. So Hayy understood that what He is in Himself is far greater than all of it. He is more perfect, more complete, more beautiful, more radiant, more lovely, and more lasting, and the things He made cannot even be compared to Him.

Hayy kept tracing every quality of perfection, and he found that every one of them belongs to the Maker and comes from Him. He saw that the Maker has a better claim to each of them than anything else that is described by it.

Then he traced every quality of imperfection, and he found the Maker free of all of them and far above them. How could He be anything but free of them? All that "imperfection" ever means is plain non-existence, or something tied to non-existence. How could non-existence touch or cling to One who is pure existence, the Necessary Being by His own nature, who gives every existing thing its existence? Nothing has existence except through Him. He is existence, He is perfection, He is completeness, He is beauty, He is radiance, He is power, He is knowledge. He is He. "Everything perishes except His face." God has spoken the truth.

That was where his knowledge had reached when he was five weeks of years old, which is thirty-five years. By now the Maker had taken such deep root in his heart that he could think of nothing else. He had stopped studying the things that exist and investigating them. It came to the point where he could not look at anything without seeing in it the mark of the Maker's workmanship. From that moment his mind would jump straight to the Maker and leave the thing made. His longing for Him grew so strong that his heart was wrenched away completely from the lower world of the senses. It clung to the higher world, the world that is grasped by the mind alone.

Once he had knowledge of this exalted Being, whose existence is permanent and who is the cause of the existence of everything else, Hayy wanted to know by what means he had come to know Him. What power in him had grasped this Being? So he went through all his senses, which are hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. He saw that none of them perceives anything except a body, or something that belongs to a body. Hearing perceives sounds, which are the trembling of the air when bodies collide. Sight perceives only colors. Smell perceives odors. Taste perceives flavors. Touch perceives temperature, hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness. The power of imagination, too, perceives nothing that lacks length, width, and depth. All of these things that are perceived are qualities of bodies, and the senses can perceive nothing else. The reason is that they are powers spread through bodies, and they are divided when the bodies are divided. So they can only perceive something that can be divided. If a power is spread through something divisible, then whatever it perceives is divided along with it. So any power that lives in a body can only perceive a body, or something that is body.

But it had already become clear to him that the Necessary Being is free of the qualities of bodies in every way. So there was no way to grasp Him except by something that is not a body, and is not a power in a body. It would have to have no connection with bodies of any kind. It could be neither inside them nor outside them, neither joined to them nor separate from them.

And Hayy had found that he did grasp Him, and the knowledge of Him was firmly rooted in him. So he saw that the self by which he grasped Him is not physical, and that none of the qualities of bodies can apply to it. Whatever he perceived of his own outward self, the bodily part, was not the truth of who he was. The truth of who he was, was that thing by which he had known the Necessary Being.

So once he knew that his self was not this bodily thing he perceived with his senses, the thing wrapped in skin, his body became cheap in his eyes. He began to think about that noble self, by which he had known that noble Necessary Being. He asked whether this self could perish, or spoil, or fade away, or whether it lasts forever. He saw that spoiling and fading away belong only to bodies. A body takes off one form and puts on another, as water turns into air, air turns into water, a plant turns into earth, and earth turns into a plant. That is what spoiling means.

But something that is not a body, and does not need a body to hold it up, and is entirely free of bodily nature, cannot be imagined as spoiling at all.

So Hayy was now sure that his true self could not spoil. Next he wanted to know what its condition would be when it threw off the body and was left without it. He had already seen that it throws the body off only when the body stops being a suitable tool for it. So he went through all the powers of perception. He saw that each one is sometimes perceiving in potential and sometimes perceiving in act. Take the eye. When it is shut, or turned away from what can be seen, it perceives in potential. That means it is not perceiving now but will perceive later. When it is open and facing something visible, it perceives in act. That means it is perceiving right now. Every one of these powers is like that, sometimes in potential and sometimes in act. Now, if one of these powers has never yet perceived in act, then as long as it remains in potential it does not long for the thing that is its own to perceive. It has never gotten to know it. Think of a person born blind. But if the power has perceived in act at some time and then has gone back to potential, then it does long, for as long as it stays in potential, to perceive in act again. It has come to know what it perceives, has become attached to it, and yearns for it. Think of someone who could see and then went blind. He never stops longing for the sights.

The more complete, radiant, and beautiful the thing perceived, the greater the longing, and the greater the pain of losing it. That is why the pain of someone who loses his sight after having had it is greater than the pain of someone who loses his sense of smell. The things that sight perceives are more complete and beautiful than the things that smell perceives. Now suppose there is something whose perfection has no limit, and whose beauty, loveliness, and radiance have no end, something above all perfection, radiance, and loveliness. Suppose nothing in existence is perfect, beautiful, radiant, or lovely unless it comes from that thing and overflows from it. Then someone who has lost the perception of that thing, after having come to know it, must be in pains without end for as long as he is without it. In the same way, someone who perceives it always must be in a delight that never breaks, in a happiness with nothing beyond it, in a joy and gladness that never end.

Hayy had also seen clearly that the Necessary Being is described by every quality of perfection, and is far above all qualities of imperfection and free of them.

And he had seen that the thing by which we reach the perception of Him is not like bodies, and does not spoil when they spoil. From this it was clear to him what happens to anyone who has a self like this, a self made ready for this kind of perception, when death makes him throw off the body. There are two possibilities. The first is that during the time he was managing the body, he never came to know the Necessary Being, never was joined to Him, and never even heard of Him. When such a person leaves the body he does not long for that Being, and he feels no pain at losing Him.

As for all the bodily powers, they fail when the body fails. So they do not long for what those powers used to ask for, or yearn for it, or feel pain at its loss.

This is the state of all the animals that cannot reason, whether they have a human form or not.

The second possibility is that during the time he was managing the body, he did come to know this Being. He knew how perfect, great, powerful, and beautiful He is. But he turned away from Him and followed his own desires, until death found him in that state. Such a person is shut out from direct vision, and he still has the longing for it. So he stays in long torment and pain without end.

Some are freed from that pain after a long struggle, and see what they had longed for before. Others stay in their pain forever. It depends on how ready each person's self was, in his bodily life, for one outcome or the other.

The third case is someone who came to know the Necessary Being before he left his body. He turned to Him with his whole self, and held to the thought of His majesty and beautiful radiance. He never turned away until death found him, and death found him in that state of turning toward Him and actually seeing Him.

When this person leaves the body, he stays in a delight that never ends, in gladness, joy, and lasting happiness. His direct vision of that Necessary Being goes on without a break, and it is free of any murk or mixture. What the bodily powers demanded, all those things of the senses, falls away from him. Compared with that new state, those things are pains, evils, and obstacles.

So Hayy had learned that the perfection of his self, and its delight, lie in one thing only: direct vision of the Necessary Being, always, in act, all the time. He must never turn away from Him even for the blink of an eye. Then death would find him in the middle of that vision, and his delight would run on without any pain in between.

Then he began to think about how he could keep up this direct vision in act, so that he would never turn away. He held on to the thought of the Necessary Being every hour. But all it took was for something he could sense to catch his eye, or for the cry of some animal to pierce his ears, or for some image to cross his mind, or for pain to strike one of his limbs, or for hunger, thirst, cold, or heat to seize him, or for him to need to get up and relieve himself. Then his concentration would break. He would fall from the state he was in, and getting back to the state of direct vision was hard, and only came after great effort.

He feared that death might surprise him while he was turned away. Then he would end in never-ending misery, and the pain of the veil.

This state of his made him wretched, and he was worn out looking for a cure.

So he began to go through all the kinds of animals, looking at what they do and what they work for. He hoped he might notice that one of them had sensed this Being and was striving toward Him. Then he could learn from it something that might be the means of his own rescue.

He saw that every one of them works only to get its food, and whatever its appetites call for in eating, drinking, and mating, in finding shade and finding warmth. They work at this night and day, until they die and their time runs out.

He saw none of them departing from this way, or working for anything else at any time. So it was clear to him that they had never sensed that Being, and had not longed for Him, and had not come to know Him in any way. They were all heading toward non-existence, or toward a state very like it.

Once he had judged the animals this way, he knew that the judgment must apply even more to plants. Plants have only some of the powers of perception that animals have.

If the animals, which have the more complete perception, did not reach this knowledge, then the plants, which have less, are even less likely to. Besides, he had also seen that everything plants do goes no further than feeding and reproducing.

After that he looked at the stars and the heavenly spheres. He saw that all of them move in an orderly way, following a pattern. He saw that they are clear and bright, and far from any change or spoiling. So he strongly guessed that they must have selves apart from their bodies, and that these selves know the Necessary Being. He guessed that these knowing selves are not bodies, and are not stamped into bodies, just like his own knowing self. Why should they not have selves like that, free of bodily nature, when he has one, weak as he is and so much in need of things of the senses, and one of the bodies that spoil? And in spite of all his shortcomings, they had not stopped his self from being free of bodies and unspoilable. So it was clear to him that the heavenly bodies have an even better claim to such a self. He knew that they know the Necessary Being and see Him always in act. The obstacles that cut him off from constant direct vision, which came from things of the senses, are not found in the heavenly bodies.

Then he wondered why he, out of all the kinds of animals, had been given this self, the one by which he resembled the heavenly bodies.

He had seen earlier, when studying the elements and how they change into one another, that nothing on the face of the earth stays in its form. Coming-to-be and passing away follow one another forever. He had seen that most of these bodies are mixed, made from opposite things, and this is why they come to spoil. Nothing is found in pure form. But anything that comes close to being pure and clean with no mixture is very far from spoiling, such as gold and rubies. And the simple bodies are pure, and that is why they are far from spoiling, and forms do not take turns in them.

He had also seen there that among all the bodies in the world of coming-to-be and passing away, some have their reality held together by one form added to what it means to be a body. These are the four elements. Others have their reality held together by more than one, such as animals and plants.

A thing whose reality is held together by fewer forms does fewer things, and is farther from life. If it had no form at all, there would be no road to life in it. It would be in a state very like non-existence. A thing whose reality is held together by more forms does more things, and enters more fully into life. And if a form is of the kind that cannot be separated from the matter that it belongs to, then life is fully clear in that thing, and complete and strong.

So the thing with no form at all is matter, and it has no life in it. It is very like non-existence. The thing held together by one form is the four elements. They are at the first rank of existence in the world of coming-to-be and passing away, and things with many forms are put together from them.

These elements have a very weak life, because each moves in only one way. Their life is weak because each has an opposite that plainly stands against it and works against what its nature calls for, and tries to change its form.

So its existence is not secure, and its life is weak. Plants have a stronger life than the elements, and animals have a life that shows more clearly than plants do.

Here is why. When one element's nature dominates a mixture, it is strong in it and overpowers the natures of the remaining elements and cancels their powers. The mixture then counts as that dominant element. Such a mixture deserves only a little life, just as the element itself deserves only a little, and a weak one. But take a mixture in which the nature of no single element dominates. The elements in it are balanced and equal. Each one cancels the power of another no more than that other cancels its own. They act on one another equally. No element's action is clearer in it, and none of them takes control. So it is very unlike any one of the elements. It is as if its form had no opposite. So it deserves life.

The more this balance increases, and the more complete it is and the farther from leaning to either side, the farther it is from having any opposite, and the more perfect its life is.

The animal spirit has its home in the heart. It is very well balanced, because it is finer than earth and water and thicker than fire and air. So it counts as the middle, and none of the elements is plainly its opposite.

That makes it ready for the animal form. So Hayy saw that the most balanced of these animal spirits must be the one made ready for the fullest life possible in the world of coming-to-be and passing away. Such a spirit would come close to being called a thing with no opposite to its form. That is why it would resemble the heavenly bodies, whose forms have no opposite. The spirit of that animal would be like something truly in the middle of the elements. Fire and air move upward and water and earth move downward, but this spirit would go neither up nor down. Suppose it could be set in the middle, halfway between the center of the world and the highest point that fire reaches upward, and suppose nothing could spoil it. It would stay there. It would not seek to rise, and it would not seek to fall.

And if it moved from place to place, it would move around the middle, the way the heavenly bodies do. If it moved in place, it would turn on itself, and it would be round in shape, since it could be nothing else. So it is very much like the heavenly bodies.

Hayy had gone through the states of the animals, and he had seen nothing in them to suggest that any had sensed the Necessary Being. He knew that his own self had sensed Him. So he concluded firmly that he was the animal with the balanced spirit, the one that resembles the heavenly bodies. It was clear to him that he was a different kind from all other animals. He had been created for a different purpose, and made ready for something great, for which no other kind of animal was made ready. It was honor enough that the lowest of his two parts, the bodily one, was the most like the heavenly substances, which lie outside the world of coming-to-be and passing away, and are free from the flaws of decay, transformation, and change.

The nobler of his two parts is the thing by which he knew the Necessary Being. This knowing thing is something divine, from the Lord. It is not subject to change and cannot spoil. None of the descriptions that fit bodies fit it. No sense can perceive it. It cannot be pictured in the imagination. No tool other than itself can bring you to know it. You can come to it only by means of itself. It is the knower, the known, and the knowing. It is the one who understands, the thing understood, and the understanding. In none of this is there any separation between the parts, because separation and division belong to bodies and their attachments, and here there is no body, no quality of a body, and nothing attached to a body! So Hayy had found the reason he alone among all kinds of animals was set apart by his likeness to the heavenly bodies. He saw that he must take up their ways, imitate their actions, and be like them as far as he could.

In the same way he saw that by his nobler part, the part by which he knew the Necessary Being, he has a likeness to Him, in that he is free of the qualities of bodies, just as the Necessary Being is. So he saw that he must also work to gain the Necessary Being's qualities for himself in any way he could. He must take on His character and follow His actions. He must work hard to carry out His will and submit to whatever He commands. He must be content with all His decrees, from the heart, inwardly and outwardly, so that he is glad of them even when they hurt his body, harm it, or wreck it.

And he saw that he also has a likeness to all the other kinds of animals, through his lowest part, which belongs to the world of coming-to-be and passing away. That part is the dark, dense body, which demands all kinds of sense things: food, drink, and mating. He also saw that this body was not made for him without a purpose or joined to him for nothing. He must look after it and set its affairs right.

He could do this looking-after only by actions like those of the other animals.

So the actions he ought to perform pointed, in his mind, toward three aims. The first was an action that imitates the animals that cannot reason.

The second was an action that imitates the heavenly bodies.

The third was an action that imitates the Necessary Being.

The first kind of imitation is required of him because of his dark body, with its divided organs, its different powers, and its various urges.

The second is required of him because he has the animal spirit, which lives in the heart and is the source for the rest of the body and for the powers in it.

The third is required of him because of what he is in himself, that is, the self by which he knew the Necessary Being.

Earlier he had come to see that his happiness and his rescue from misery lie in keeping up direct vision of this Necessary Being, so that he would never turn away even for the blink of an eye.

Then he looked into how he could keep this up. His inquiry showed him that he had to work at these three kinds of imitation. The first kind gives him no part of this direct vision. It does the opposite. It draws him away from it and stands in its way, since it is busy with things of the senses, and every one of those is a curtain hung in front of the direct vision. It is needed only to keep alive this animal spirit, by which the second imitation, of the heavenly bodies, comes about.

So necessity calls for it, by this road, even though it is never free of that harm.

The second imitation does give him a large share of direct vision, and gives it constantly. But it is a vision with something mixed into it. Anyone who has this kind of direct vision all the time is still aware of his own self, and looks back at it while he sees. This will be made clear later.

The third imitation gives pure direct vision, a complete absorption in which there is no glance in any direction except toward the Necessary Being. The person who sees in this way has lost his own self. His self has gone from him, passed away, and dissolved. (This "passing away" is what the mystics call the fading of the self out of its own awareness.)

It is the same with all other selves, many or few, except the essence of the One who is the Truth, the Necessary Being, who is exalted, great, and mighty.

So it was clear to Hayy that what he was ultimately after was this third imitation. It could come only after long training and practice in the second. And this time of practice could not be kept up by the first imitation alone. He knew that the first imitation, though necessary, is in itself an obstacle. It helps only by accident and not by its own nature, but it is necessary all the same. So he held himself to a rule. He would give his body a share of this first imitation only as far as necessity required. That meant just enough for the animal spirit to survive, and no less.

He found that two things are required by necessity to keep this spirit alive. One is what supplies it from inside and replaces what drains out of it, which is food.

The other is what protects it from outside and keeps away every kind of harm: cold, heat, rain, the blaze of the sun, dangerous animals, and the like.

He saw that if he took these necessities at random, as they happened to come, he might slip into excess and take more than was enough.

Then he would be working against himself without knowing it. So he saw that prudence meant setting limits for himself in this matter, which he would not go past, and amounts he would not exceed. He saw that the rule had to cover the kind of thing he ate.

It also had to cover what that thing was, how much of it, and how long a time should pass between one return to eating and the next.

First he looked at the kinds of things he could eat, and he saw that there are three sorts. The first is plants that are not yet fully ripe and have not reached their completion. These are the various fresh greens that can be eaten.

The second is the fruit of plants that are complete and finished, and that have produced their seed so that another plant of their kind may grow and the kind be preserved. These are the various fruits, fresh and dried.

The third is animals that can be eaten, either those of the land or those of the sea.

He was already convinced that all these kinds are the work of that Necessary Being, near whom, as he had seen, his happiness lies, and whom he was trying to be like. Eating them, without any doubt, cuts them off from their perfection and comes between them and the highest end they were meant for.

So doing that was an objection against the Maker's act.

And this objection runs against what he was seeking, which was to be near Him and be like Him.

So he saw that the right course, if he could, would be to hold back from eating entirely. But he could not. If he held back from food, it would end in the ruin of his own body. That would be an even greater objection against the Maker than the first. His body is nobler than those other things, whose ruin is the reason he stays alive.

So he chose the lighter of the two harms, and put up with the milder of the two objections. He decided to take from these kinds only if he could not find the others, and in the amount that he would work out later.

But when all of them were available, he thought he should take care and pick out from them whatever it would be no great objection to take. An example is the flesh of fruits that are fully ripe, when what is inside them is ready to grow into a seed. The condition is that he look after the seed: he must not eat it, or spoil it, or throw it in a place unfit for plants, such as bare rock or salt marsh.

If he could not find fruits of that kind, whose taste feeds the body, such as apples, pears, and plums, then he could eat the fruits that feed only through the seed itself, such as walnuts and chestnuts. Or else he could eat greens that had not yet reached their full growth.

The condition for both was that he choose the ones most plentiful and quickest to reproduce, and that he not pull up their roots or destroy their seed.

If those were not to be found, he could take from animals or their eggs. The condition for animals was that he take from the kinds that were most plentiful, and never wipe out a whole species.

This is what he decided about the kind of food.

As for the amount, he decided it should be enough to end the pang of hunger and no more.

As for the time between one meal and the next, he decided that once he had taken what he needed, he should stay on that and not go looking for more, until a weakness came over him that would stop him from doing some of the actions he owed in the second imitation, which will be described soon.

As for what necessity requires to keep the animal spirit safe from outside, that was an easy matter. He was covered in skins, and he had a home that protected him from whatever came at him from outside. He was content with that and thought no more about it. He held himself to the rules for eating that he had laid down, which were described above.

Then he took up the second work, which is imitating the heavenly bodies, following their example, and taking on their qualities. He saw these qualities fall into three kinds. The first kind is qualities they have toward what lies beneath them, in the world of coming-to-be and passing away. This is what they give it: heating by their nature, cooling by accident, giving light, thinning and thickening, and all the other things they do to it. By these things the world below becomes ready to have spiritual forms flow onto it from the Maker, the Necessary Being.

The second kind is qualities they have in themselves. They are clear, shining, and pure, free of murk and every kind of filth. They move in circles, some around their own center and some around the center of another body.

The third kind is qualities they have toward the Necessary Being. They see Him always. They never turn away from Him. They long for Him. They act at His command and are made to serve His will. They move only as He wishes, and are in His grasp.

So he set out to imitate them as far as he could in each of these three kinds.

In the first kind, he imitated them like this. He bound himself never to see any animal or plant that was in need, or hurt, or harmed, or held back by some obstacle, and be able to remove that trouble, without removing it.

So whenever his eye fell on a plant that something had shut off from the sun, or that another plant had wound around and was hurting, or that was so thirsty it was nearly dying, he took away whatever was shutting it off, if it could be moved. Or he put a divider between the plant and its tormentor, one that did not harm the tormentor. And he watered it as much as he could.

Whenever his eye fell on an animal that a beast of prey was chasing, or that had been caught in a snare, or that had a thorn stuck in it, or had something painful fall into its eyes or ears, or was suffering from thirst or hunger, he took on the job of removing all that as best he could, and fed it and gave it water.

Whenever his eye fell on water that was running to water some plant or animal but had been stopped from getting there by some obstacle, a stone that had fallen into the channel or a bank that had caved in, he cleared it all away.

He kept working at this kind of imitation until he had brought it to its highest point.

In the second kind, he imitated them like this. He held himself to constant cleanliness and to removing dirt and filth from his body. He washed with water most of the time. He kept his nails and teeth clean, and the folds of his body too, and scented them as well as he could with the sweet-smelling plants and the different kinds of fragrant oils. He kept his clothes clean and scented. He came to gleam with beauty, loveliness, cleanness, and sweet smell.

Along with this, he took up various kinds of circling motion. Sometimes he walked around the island and along its shore, roaming its far corners. Sometimes he walked around his home, or around some little hill, a set number of times, either at a walk or at a run. And sometimes he spun around on his own spot until he fainted.

In the third kind, he imitated them like this. He held constantly to the thought of the Necessary Being. Then he cut himself off from everything the senses offered.

He shut his eyes and stopped his ears. He did all he could to stop following the images of his imagination. He tried as hard as he could to think of nothing but the Necessary Being, and to let nothing else share his thought. To help himself do this he spun around and around, pushing harder and harder.

When he spun very hard, everything the senses give faded from him. His imagination grew weak, and so did all the other powers that work through bodily tools. The action of his self, which is free of the body, grew strong. At certain times his thought would come free of all mixture, and by it he would see the Necessary Being. Then the bodily powers would come charging back at him, spoil his state, and drop him down "to the lowest of the low."

He would begin again from the start. If weakness came over him that cut him off from his goal, he would take some food, according to the rules already given.

Then he would go back to his work of imitating the heavenly bodies in the three kinds described.

He kept at this for a long time, struggling against his bodily powers while they struggled against him, wrestling with them while they wrestled with him. In the times when he had the upper hand, and his thought came free of mixture, something of the states of the people of the third imitation flashed before him.

Then he began to go after the third imitation, and to work to gain it. He looked at the qualities of the Necessary Being.

While he was studying, before he began this practice, it had become clear to him that these qualities fall into two kinds. One kind is qualities of affirmation, such as knowledge, power, and wisdom.

The other kind is qualities of negation, such as being free of bodily nature, of the qualities of bodies and what belongs to them, and of anything even distantly connected with them.

He had also seen that the qualities of affirmation must be understood in this same spirit of being free of bodies, so that nothing in them is a quality of bodies. One quality of bodies is being many. So His essence is not made many by these qualities of affirmation. Instead they all go back to one meaning, and that meaning is the truth of His essence.

So he began to look for how to imitate Him in each of these two kinds.

As for the qualities of affirmation, he knew that all of them go back to the truth of His essence, and that there is no multiplicity in them in any way, since multiplicity belongs to bodies. He knew that His knowledge of His essence is not something added to His essence. His essence is His knowledge of His essence, and His knowledge of His essence is His essence. From this he saw that if he himself could know his own essence, the knowledge by which he knew it would not be something added to his essence. It would simply be it! So he saw that the way to be like Him in the qualities of affirmation is simply to know Him, without joining to that knowledge any quality of bodies. So he took himself in hand to do this.

As for the qualities of negation, all of them go back to being free of body.

So he began to throw off the qualities of body from his own self.

He had already thrown off many of them in his earlier training, when he was trying to be like the heavenly bodies.

But many were left over. One was the circling motion. Motion is one of the qualities most particular to bodies. Another was all his care for animals and plants, his mercy toward them, and his effort to remove what stood in their way.

These too are qualities of bodies. He first sees the need by a bodily power, and then works at it by a bodily power too.

So he began to throw all of it off, since none of it fit the state he was now seeking.

From then on he kept himself to stillness in the depths of his cave. He sat with his head bowed and his eyes lowered, turned away from everything the senses give and from all the bodily powers. His whole concern and thought were gathered on the Necessary Being alone, with no partner. Whenever something else crossed his mind, he drove it out of his imagination as hard as he could, and fought it off. He trained himself in this. He kept at it for a long time, until days went by when he neither ate nor moved.

In the middle of this hard struggle, there were times when everything slipped from his memory and thought except his own self. That did not slip away from him while he was absorbed in seeing the First, the True, the Necessary Being.

This troubled him. He knew that it was a mixture in pure direct vision, and a sharing in his looking.

He kept seeking passing away from his own self, and a clean purity in seeing the True One, until it came to him. The heavens and the earth and what lies between them slipped from his memory and thought. So did all the spiritual forms, and all the bodily powers, and all the powers that are separate from matter, which are the selves that know the True Being. His own self slipped away among all those selves. Everything faded and dissolved, and became "scattered dust." Nothing was left but the One, the True, who exists, whose existence is firm.

And the One was saying, in a saying that is not something added to His essence: "To whom belongs the kingdom today? To God, the One, the Overpowering." God has spoken the truth. Hayy understood these words and heard the call. It did not stop him from understanding that he knew no language and could not speak.

He was absorbed in this state of his, and he saw what "no eye has seen, no ear has heard," and what "has never occurred to any human heart."

So do not hang your heart on a description of something that has never occurred to any human heart. Many things that do occur to human hearts are hard to describe. How much harder is a thing that cannot come to the heart at all, that does not belong to its world or its kind! By the heart I do not mean the piece of flesh, and not the spirit in its hollow either. I mean the form of that spirit, which flows with its powers over the human body. Any of these three can be called a heart. But that thing cannot occur to any one of the three, and expression is possible only for what has occurred to them.

Anyone who tries to put that state into words is trying the impossible. He is like a man who wants to taste colors as colors, or who asks whether black, say, is sweet or sour.

Still, I won't leave you with nothing. I can give you a few hints about the wonders Hayy saw at that station. They are only comparisons, not a knock on the door of the truth itself, because there is no way to know what that station holds except to arrive there.

So listen with the ear of your heart, and look hard at what I point to. Perhaps you will find guidance in it that puts you on the highway. One condition: don't ask me now for more explanation by word of mouth than I have set down here. The room is narrow, and forcing into words what was never meant to be spoken is dangerous.

Here is what I say. When Hayy had passed away from himself and from every other essence, and saw nothing in existence but the One who stands on His own and holds all things up, and had seen what he saw, he came back to noticing other things as he woke from that state, which was like drunkenness. Then a thought struck him. He had no essence of his own, distinct from the essence of the Real (God, exalted is He). The truth of his essence was the essence of the Real. The thing he had first supposed to be his own essence, separate from God's, was nothing at all in truth. There was nothing there but the essence of the Real. It was like sunlight falling on dense bodies, so that you see it appear in them.

Even though we name the light after the body it shows up in, it is really nothing but the light of the sun.

If that body goes away, its light goes with it, and the sun's light stays exactly as it was. It was not lessened by the body's presence, and it is not increased by the body's absence.

Whenever a body arises that is fit to receive that light, it receives it. When the body is gone, the receiving is gone too, and there is nothing left to speak of. This was the idea Hayy now held, and it rested on what had become clear to him: that the essence of the Real, mighty and majestic, is not made many in any way, and that His knowledge of His own essence is that essence itself.

From this it followed, in his mind, that if he had gained knowledge of his own essence, then his essence had been gained. And he had gained that knowledge, so the essence had been gained.

But this essence is present to nothing except itself, and its being present is the essence. So he was that very essence.

The same went for all the essences that are free of matter and that know the Real. He had first seen them as many. Now, in this way of thinking, they became one thing to him.

This doubt came close to taking root. But God caught him with His mercy and rescued him with His guidance, and Hayy saw that it had risen only from what was left in him of the darkness of bodies and the murk of the senses.

For many and few, one and oneness, gathering together and coming apart are all qualities of bodies. Those free essences that know the Real, mighty and majestic, are clear of matter. So we must not say they are many, and we must not say they are one. Manyness only means that one essence differs from another, and oneness only comes about by being joined together.

None of this can be understood except of composite things, the ones clothed in matter.

Here language gets extremely cramped. If you speak of those free essences in the plural, as our word here does, you suggest that they are many, and they are clear of manyness. If you speak of them in the singular, you suggest that they are merged into one, which is impossible for them.

I can picture one of those bats, whose eyes the sun darkens, reading this and shaking with a fit of madness. "You've split hairs so fine," he says, "that you've stripped off the instinct of sensible people and thrown out the verdict of reason. Reason's own rule is that a thing is either one or many." Let him slow down. Let him blunt his tongue and doubt himself for once. Let him learn from this low world of the senses, which is his whole ground floor, in the way Hayy learned from it. Hayy looked at the world one way and saw it as many, so many that they could not be counted or contained by any limit. Then he looked at it another way and saw it as one.

He stayed torn over this and could not settle on either description to the exclusion of the other.

Now if the world of the senses is where gathering and singling out begin, and it holds separation and connection, place and difference, agreement and disagreement, and it still leaves us in that doubt, what should we think of the divine world? Nothing there can be called "all" or "some." Not one spoken word can be used about it without some false suggestion creeping in. So only someone who has seen it knows it, and its truth is settled only for someone who has arrived there.

As for his complaint, "you have stripped off the instinct of sensible people and thrown out the verdict of reason," we grant it. We leave him alone with his reason and his sensible people. The reason he means is only the power of speech and thought that looks over the individual things of the sensed world and picks out the general idea from each. And the sensible people he means look at things with that same kind of looking. What we are talking about lies far above all of this. So let anyone who knows nothing but the senses and their general ideas close his ears to it, and let him go back to his own crowd, of whom it is written: "They know only the outward side of the life of this world, and of the next world they are heedless." God the Almighty has spoken truly.

If you are content with this kind of hint about the divine world, and don't load these words with the meanings people usually load them with, then we can tell you a little more of what Hayy saw at the station of the truthful ones mentioned before. Here it is. After a stretch of pure absorption and complete passing away, and the truth of arrival, he saw the highest sphere, the one with no body. He saw an essence clear of matter. It was not the essence of the One who is the Real, and it was not the sphere itself, and it was not anything other than these. It was like the image of the sun that appears in a polished mirror, which is not the sun, and not the mirror, and not anything else.

He saw that the free essence of that sphere had a perfection, brightness, and beauty too great to be described by any tongue, too fine to be dressed in any letter or sound. He saw it in the utmost pleasure, joy, bliss, and delight, from seeing the essence of the Real, whose majesty is great.

He also saw, for the sphere next below it, the sphere of the fixed stars, an essence that was likewise clear of matter. It was not the essence of the One who is the Real, and not the free essence of the highest sphere, and not the sphere itself, and not anything other than these.

It was like the sun's image in a mirror, when that image has been thrown back to it from another mirror that faces the sun. He saw that this essence too had the same brightness, beauty, and pleasure that he had seen in the essence of the highest sphere.

He also saw, for the sphere after that, the sphere of Saturn, a free essence clear of matter. It was none of the ones he had seen before, and not anything other than them. It was like the sun's image in a mirror when the image has been thrown back to it from a mirror that faces the sun. And he saw in this essence too the same brightness and pleasure as in the one before.

He went on seeing, for each sphere, a free essence clear of matter. It was none of the essences before it, and not other than them. Each was like the sun's image being cast from mirror to mirror, in ranks arranged to match the order of the spheres.

And in each of these essences he saw such beauty, brightness, pleasure, and joy as no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has imagined.

At last he came to the world of coming-to-be and passing-away, everything inside the sphere of the Moon.

There he saw an essence clear of matter. It was none of the essences he had seen before it, and not other than them.

This essence has seventy thousand faces. Each face has seventy thousand mouths, and each mouth seventy thousand tongues. With all of them it praises the essence of the One who is the Real, calls Him holy, and glorifies Him, never tiring. Manyness seems to belong to this essence, yet it is not many. Hayy saw in it the same perfection and pleasure he had seen in those before it.

It was as if this essence were the image of the sun in rippling water, the image that reaches the last of the mirrors, after being thrown back in the order described, starting from the first mirror, which faced the sun itself.

Then he saw a free essence that belonged to his own self. If the essence with seventy thousand faces could be divided into parts, we would say this one was a part of it.

If it had not come into being after not existing, we would say it was that essence itself. If it were not tied to his body from the moment his body came to be, we would say it had never come into being. And at this rank he saw essences like his own. Some belonged to bodies that had existed and then wasted away, and some to bodies that were still alive alongside him. They are so many that they have no end, if it can be said that they are many. Or they are all one, if it can be said that they are one.

He saw that his own essence, and those others at his rank, had endless beauty, brightness, and pleasure, such as no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and no human heart has imagined. Those who describe it cannot describe it, and only those who have arrived and know can grasp it.

He also saw many essences, free of matter, that were like rusted mirrors, coated over with filth. And these had turned their backs on the polished mirrors where the sun's image is stamped. They looked away from them. Hayy saw in these essences an ugliness and a lack he had never imagined. He saw them in endless pain and in griefs that never fade. The canopy of torment had closed around them. The fire of the veil burned them. And they were sawed apart, torn between alarm and longing.

Beyond these tormented ones he saw other essences that flash into view and fade, take shape and come undone. He held his gaze on them and looked closely. He saw a great terror and a grave affair, a swift making, a wise ordering, a shaping and breathing, a founding and an erasing.

He had barely lingered there a moment when his senses came back. He woke from that state, which was like a swoon. His foot slipped from that station, the world of the senses appeared to him, and the divine world went out of sight. The two cannot be together in one moment, since this world and the next are like two wives: if you please one, you anger the other.

Now suppose you say: "From this vision you describe, it seems that if a free essence belongs to a body that lasts forever and never decays, like the spheres, then the essence lasts forever. But if it belongs to a body that decays, like a speaking animal, then the essence decays too, dissolves, and vanishes. That fits your comparison with reflections in mirrors. The image only stays as long as the mirror stays. When the mirror is spoiled, the image is spoiled and vanishes." To that I say: how quickly you forgot our agreement, and slipped out of the tie that held you! Didn't we tell you already that the room for expression here is narrow, and that words always suggest something other than the truth? What you imagined only trapped you because you made the comparison and the thing compared behave the same in every respect.

We shouldn't even do that in ordinary kinds of conversation. How much less here, where the sun and its light, its image and shape, the mirrors and the images in them, are all things that cannot exist apart from bodies. They stand only through bodies and in them, which is why they need them in order to exist and are gone when the bodies are gone.

The divine essences and the spirits of the Lord are different. They are all clear of bodies and everything that clings to bodies, and lifted as high above them as anything can be. They have no tie to bodies and no dependence on them. For them it is all the same whether bodies are destroyed or last, exist or do not. Their only tie and dependence is on the essence of the One who is the Real, the Existing, the Necessary Being. He is their first, their origin, their cause, and their Maker. He gives them permanence, holds them up in being, and keeps them for all time. They have no need of bodies; the bodies are the ones that need them.

If it were possible for them to cease to exist, bodies would cease to exist, since these essences are what start the bodies. In the same way, if it were possible for the essence of the One who is the Real to cease (He is exalted and holy beyond that; there is no god but He!), all these essences would cease, and bodies would cease, and the whole world of the senses would cease, and nothing would be left in existence, since everything is tied to everything else.

The world of the senses does follow the divine world, like its shadow, while the divine world does not need it and is free of it. Even so, its total ceasing to exist cannot be supposed, because it necessarily follows the divine world. Its destruction is only that it is changed, not that it is wiped out altogether. That is what the Noble Book says wherever it touches on this matter: the mountains set moving, like carded wool, and people like scattered moths.

And the sun wrapped up, and the moon, and the seas bursting forth, on the day when the earth is changed into another earth, and the heavens too.

That is as much as I can point out to you now of what Hayy saw at that noble station. Don't ask the words for more; that would only lead to excuses.

Now the rest of his story, which I will go on to tell you, God willing. When he came back to the world of the senses, after his travels wherever they took him, he grew weary of the burdens of this life and longed more and more for the farthest life. So he set about returning to that station in the way he had first sought it. He reached it with less effort than the first time, and stayed there a longer time than the first.

Then he returned to the world of the senses.

After that he strove to reach his station again, and it was easier for him than the first and second times, and he stayed longer.

The arrival at that noble station kept getting easier for him, and his stay in it kept growing longer, one stretch after another. In the end he could reach it whenever he wished and leave it only when he wished. He lived in that station and turned away from it only for his body's needs, which he had cut down until they could hardly be less.

Through all of this he wanted God, mighty and majestic, to relieve him of his whole body, the thing that called him away from that station. Then he could be free for his pleasure once and for all, and be rid of the pain he felt whenever he turned from that station to what his body needed.

He stayed in this state until he was past seven times seven years old, fifty years from his beginning.

It was then that he happened to meet Absal. The story of what passed between them comes next, God willing.

They say that on an island near the one where Hayy ibn Yaqzan was born (this follows one of the two differing accounts of how he began), a religion had arrived. It was one of the true religions, taken from one of the earlier prophets, God's blessings on them all.

This religion described all real things by means of comparisons. These were images of those things, and they fixed the outlines of those things in people's souls, as is the usual way of speaking to the general public. The religion kept spreading on that island, growing stronger and more visible, until the king of the island took it up and made the people hold to it.

Two young men of excellent and good character had grown up there. One was called Absal and the other Salaman. They received this religion and accepted it very warmly. Each bound himself to keep all its laws and to stick to all its practices, and the two became companions on that path.

From time to time they studied together the words of that law about God, mighty and majestic, and His angels, and about the promised return, the reward and the punishment.

Absal dove deeper into the inner meaning. He found spiritual meanings more easily and was more eager to interpret.

Salaman, his companion, held more firmly to the outward sense. He kept further from interpretation and stopped short of exploring or pondering. Both worked hard at the outward practices, at examining their own souls, and at struggling against their desires.

That law also held sayings that urge seclusion and solitude and show that success and rescue lie in them. It held other sayings that urge mixing with people and staying with the community.

Absal clung to seeking seclusion and judged the sayings for it to be stronger. His nature was one of steady reflection, of dwelling on lessons, and of diving down into meanings, and he found that he got most of what he hoped for from these when he was alone.

Salaman clung to staying with the community and judged the sayings for it to be stronger. His nature shrank from reflection and exploring.

To him, staying with the community was a defense against whispered temptations. It cleared away the doubts that came his way and protected him from the promptings of devils.

Their disagreement on this point was the reason they drifted apart.

Absal had heard of the island where Hayy ibn Yaqzan was said to have come to be. He knew of its rich land and its conveniences and its mild air, and knew that anyone looking for solitude could have it there. So he made up his mind to travel there and live apart from people for the rest of his life.

He gathered what money he had. With part of it he bought a boat to carry him to that island, and the rest he gave out to poor people. He said goodbye to his companion Salaman and took to the sea. The sailors carried him to that island, set him down on its shore, and left.

So Absal stayed on that island. He worshiped God, mighty and majestic, honored Him, called Him holy, and thought about His beautiful names and His high attributes. His thoughts did not break off, and his reflection was not clouded.

When he needed food, he took from the island's fruit and from what he hunted enough to stop his hunger.

He lived like this for some time, in complete happiness and deepest comfort in speaking privately with his Lord.

Every day he saw signs of God's kindness and the special gifts He gave him. He saw how God made his search and his food easy for him, and this made his certainty firm and his eyes glad.

All this while, Hayy ibn Yaqzan was deep in his noble stations. He left his cave only once a week, to take whatever food came to hand. So Absal did not find him at first. He wandered around the edges of the island and roamed its corners, seeing no human being and no trace of one. This made him feel more at home, and his soul opened up at what he had decided to do: go all the way in seeking seclusion and solitude.

Then at last it happened, at one of those times, that Hayy ibn Yaqzan came out to look for food while Absal was in that part of the island. Each of them caught sight of the other.

Absal had no doubt that this was one of the devout who had cut themselves off, and had come to this island to be away from people, just as he had. He was afraid that if he approached and got acquainted, he would ruin the man's state and come between him and his hope.

Hayy did not know what Absal was. He had never seen him in the form of any of the animals he had looked at before.

Absal was wearing a black cloak of hair and wool, and Hayy thought it was his natural covering.

So he stood and stared at him in wonder for a long while.

Absal turned and ran away from him, afraid that Hayy would distract him from his own state. Hayy followed his tracks, because it was in his nature to search out the truth about things.

When he saw Absal running even harder,

he hung back and hid himself, until Absal thought he had turned away and gone off somewhere else.

Then Absal began to pray and recite, to call out to God and weep, to plead and to move himself with feeling, until it shut out everything else.

Hayy crept closer bit by bit, and Absal did not notice him until Hayy was near enough to hear his recitation and his praise, and to see his humility and his tears.

Hayy heard a beautiful voice and words in an orderly chain, unlike anything any animal had made.

He looked at his shape and outline and saw it was the same as his own. He also realized that the cloak on Absal was not natural skin but clothing that had been made, like the clothing he wore himself. When he saw how humble Absal was, and how he pleaded and wept, he had no doubt that this was one of the essences who know the Real. He longed for him and wanted to see what he had, and what made him weep and plead. So he came still closer, until Absal felt him there. Absal ran hard, and Hayy ran hard behind him and caught him, thanks to the strength God had given him in mind and body. Hayy held him tight and would not let him go.

When Absal looked at Hayy, dressed in the skins of furry animals, with his hair grown so long it covered much of him, and saw how fast he ran and how strong his grip was, he was very afraid of him. He began to beg him and plead with him in words that Hayy could not understand and did not know, though he could recognize in them the signs of fear.

So Hayy put him at ease with sounds he had learned from the animals. He ran his hand over Absal's head and stroked his sides.

He fawned on him and showed how glad he was to see him.

Finally Absal's heart grew calm, and he understood that Hayy meant him no harm.

Absal had long loved the science of interpretation.

He had learned most of the languages and mastered them.

So he began speaking to Hayy and asking about his situation in every language he knew, and he tried to get through to him, but could not. And Hayy was amazed the whole time at what he heard and did not know what it was.

But he showed Absal that he was glad and welcoming.

Each marveled at the other.

Absal had some food with him, which he had brought along from the inhabited island. He offered it to Hayy, who did not know what it was, because he had never seen it before.

Absal ate some and motioned for Hayy to eat. Hayy thought about the rules he had put on himself for taking food. He did not know where this thing being offered came from, or whether it was allowed for him to eat it. So he refused.

Absal kept pleading with him and coaxing him.

By now Hayy had grown fond of Absal, and he was afraid that if he kept refusing, Absal would feel shut out. So he went ahead and ate from that food.

When he tasted it and found it good, he saw the wrong he had done in breaking his own promises about what he would eat. He regretted what he had done. He wanted to part from Absal and get back to his own business of returning to his noble station, but the vision did not come to him quickly.

So he decided to stay with Absal in the world of the senses until he found out the truth about him. That way no longing for him would be left in Hayy's own soul, and he could go back to his station afterward with nothing to distract him.

He stuck with Absal. And when Absal saw that Hayy did not speak, he stopped worrying that Hayy might attack his religion. He hoped he could teach Hayy speech, knowledge, and religion, and that this would bring him great reward and nearness to God.

Absal began by teaching him to speak. He would point to actual things, say their names, repeat the names, and make Hayy say them. Hayy would say each name while looking at the thing pointed to. In this way he taught him all the names and led him along step by step, until in a very short time he could speak.

Then Absal began to ask about his story and how he had come to be on that island. Hayy told him that he knew of no beginning for himself, no father and no mother, other than the doe who had raised him. He described his whole story to Absal, and how he had climbed up through knowledge until he reached the rank of arrival.

When Absal heard him describe those true things and those essences, free of the world of the senses, that know the essence of the Real, mighty and majestic, and heard him describe that Real, exalted and glorious, with His beautiful attributes, he heard too whatever Hayy could put into words of what he saw at the arrival: the pleasures of those who arrive and the pains of those kept behind the veil. And Absal had no doubt that everything in his own religion about God, mighty and majestic, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, His Garden and His Fire, was the comparison for the very things Hayy ibn Yaqzan had seen. The eyes of his heart opened, and the fire of his mind was lit. What he had reasoned and what had been handed down to him came together as one. The ways of interpreting became short for him. There was no hard place in the law left that was not now plain to him, no lock that did not open, no obscurity that did not clear. He became one of those who have understanding.

From then on he looked at Hayy ibn Yaqzan with honor and reverence, and became sure that Hayy was one of God's friends, of whom it is said that "no fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve."

He bound himself to serve Hayy and to follow his lead wherever two of the religious practices he had learned in his own faith seemed to conflict.

Hayy in turn kept asking Absal about himself, and Absal described his island and its people and how they had lived before the religion reached them.

He described how they lived now that it had reached them. He told Hayy everything the law says about the divine world, about the Garden and the Fire, the raising of the dead, the gathering and the reckoning, the scale and the bridge.

Hayy understood all of this, and found nothing in it contrary to what he had seen at his noble station.

So he knew that the one who had described these things and brought them was right in his description, truthful in his words, and a messenger from his Lord. Hayy believed him, trusted him, and bore witness to his mission.

Then he came and asked Absal about the duties this messenger had brought and the acts of worship he had set up. Absal described prayer, almsgiving, fasting, the pilgrimage, and the outward acts like them. Hayy accepted them and bound himself to them. He held himself to doing them, obeying a command whose speaker he now knew to be truthful.

But two things stayed in his mind that puzzled him, and he could not see the wisdom in them. The first was this: why had this messenger spoken to people in comparisons for most of what he said about the divine world, and passed over plain unveiling? That left people in a serious error, picturing God as having a body and believing things about His essence that He is high above and clear of. The same went for reward and punishment. The second was this: why had the messenger stopped at these duties and acts of worship, and allowed people to gather wealth and to indulge in eating? This left people busy with what is false and turned away from what is true. Hayy's own view was that nobody should take anything except what keeps him alive. As for money, it meant nothing to him.

He looked at what the law lays down about money: almsgiving and all its branches, buying and selling, interest, fixed punishments and penalties. He found all of it strange and thought it needlessly long. He said that if people understood the matter as it really is, they would turn from these empty things to the truth and need none of it. Nobody would own so much that he could be asked for his almsgiving, or have hands cut off over stealing it, or lose lives for taking it openly.

What led him to this thought was his assumption that all people have outstanding natures, sharp minds, and firm wills. He had no idea how dull and lacking they are, how poor their judgment and weak their resolve. He did not know that they are like cattle, no, further astray.

As his concern for people grew, and he hoped they might be saved at his hands, he formed the intention of going to them, making the truth clear to them, and waking them up. He talked it over with his friend Absal and asked whether there was any way he could get to them. Absal told him about the state they were in, their weak natures, and their turning away from God's command. But Hayy could not take this in, and the hope he had formed stayed in his soul.

Absal also hoped that God might guide, through Hayy, a group of the people he knew, those who were seeking and were closer than others to being freed. So he went along with Hayy's plan. The two of them decided to stay on the seashore and not leave it by night or by day, in case God might make it easy for them to cross the sea. They stayed there and prayed to God, the Exalted, to arrange a sound outcome for them.

By the will of God, mighty and majestic, a ship lost its course, and wind and pounding waves drove it toward the shore.

When it came near the land, the people on board saw the two men on the beach.

They drew near, and Absal spoke to them and asked them to take the two of them along. They agreed and brought them aboard. Then God sent them a gentle wind that carried the ship in a very short time to the island Absal had longed for. They landed there and entered its city. Absal's friends gathered around him. He told them about Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and they took to Hayy warmly, thought his story a great one, gathered around him, and honored and respected him. Absal told Hayy that these people were the closest of all the islanders to understanding and intelligence, and that if he could not teach them, he was even less able to teach the general public.

The ruler of that island was Salaman, Absal's old friend, the one who held that people should stay with the community and who said seclusion is forbidden. Hayy set about teaching them and pouring out the secrets of wisdom to them.

But he had barely risen a little above the outward level and begun to describe things they had never heard, when they started to draw back from him. Their souls recoiled from what he brought, and their hearts resented it, though they kept a show of approval on their faces out of respect for a stranger among them and out of regard for their friend Absal. Hayy kept trying to win them over night and day, and explained the truth to them in private and in public. It only made them shy away and run from him more. They were lovers of good and eager for the truth. But because their natures were lacking, they did not seek the truth by its proper road, or take it in the way that verifies it, or look for it at its door. They did not want to learn it from the people who own it.

So Hayy gave up hope of setting them right. His hope for their improvement was cut off by how little they could take in.

After that he looked over the different kinds of people. He saw that each group was "happy with what it has," having made a god of its own whim and a deity of its own appetites. They were consumed with piling up the rubbish of this world. "Competition for more distracted them until they visited their graves." No sermon worked on them, no good word had any effect on them, and arguing only made them dig in harder.

Wisdom was out of their reach. They had no share in it. Ignorance had swamped them, and the rust of what they had earned covered their hearts. "God has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and over their eyes is a covering, and theirs is a great punishment."

He saw that the canopy of torment had closed around them, and that layers of darkness and veils had wrapped them up. Nearly all of them, except a few, held on to their religion only for the sake of this world. They had thrown behind their backs its practices, light and easy as they are, and sold them for a small price. Buying and selling kept them from remembering God, and they did not fear a day when hearts and eyes will be turned upside down. Hayy became certain, beyond any doubt, that speaking to them by unveiling was not possible. Asking of them any more work than this was not going to happen. And the benefit most of the general public gets from religious law lies only in this present life, so that a man's living stays on a steady footing and no one takes what is his. Only a rare few can win the happiness of the next life by it, those who "wanted the harvest of the next world and strove for it as it deserves, while being believers."

As for those who rebelled and preferred the life of this world, "Hell will be their home." And what is more tiring, what is more wretched, than the life of a man whose actions you could go through, from the moment he wakes until the moment he returns to bed, and find nothing in them but the effort to get some goal among these low things of the senses? It might be money he is hoarding, or a pleasure he chases, or a desire he satisfies, or a rage he is working out, or status he is gaining, or some religious act he puts on as decoration or to shield his neck. All of it is "darkness, layer upon layer, in a deep sea." "There is not one of you who will not come to it. That is a settled decree from your Lord."

When Hayy understood how people are, and that most of them are on the level of animals without speech, he knew that all wisdom, guidance, and success lie in what the messengers said and what the law delivered. It could not be otherwise, and it could not bear any addition. "For every task there are men, and everyone is eased toward what he was created for." "This is God's way, which has passed before, and you will never find any change in God's way." God the Almighty has spoken truly.

So he went back to Salaman and his companions. He apologized for what he had said to them and took it back. He told them he now saw things as they did and had been guided as they had. He urged them to hold on to what they were doing: to keep within the limits of the law and its outward acts, to say little about things that were none of their business, to believe the ambiguous passages and accept them as they stand, to shun novelties and whims, to follow the righteous ancestors and leave off new inventions. He told them to stay away from the way of the common crowd, who neglect the law and chase after this world, and he warned them against it as strongly as he could. He and his friend Absal both knew that these eager but limited people could be saved only this way. If they were lifted from it to the high ground of insight, what they now stood on would collapse. They could not reach the level of the blessed, and would wobble, turn back, and end badly.

If instead they kept on as they were until certainty came to them, they would reach safety and be among "those on the right hand," and "the foremost, the foremost, they are those brought near."

Then he said goodbye to them, and he and Absal left. They quietly worked their way back toward their own island, until God, mighty and majestic, made the crossing easy for them.

Hayy ibn Yaqzan went looking for his noble station in the same way he had first sought it, until he came back to it. Absal followed his example until he came close to it, or almost. And the two of them worshiped God on that island until certainty came to them.

That, may God strengthen you and us with a spirit from Him, is the news of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Absal, and Salaman. It holds a kind of speech found in no book and heard in no ordinary talk. It belongs to the hidden knowledge that only those who know God will accept and only those who are careless about God will not know.

In this we have gone against the way of the righteous ancestors, who guarded such things closely and were stingy with them.

What made it easy for us to give away this secret and tear the veil was what has appeared in our own time: corrupt opinions that the pseudo-philosophers of the age have put forward and spoken out loud, until they have spread through the cities and their harm has become general. We feared for the weak, who have thrown off following the prophets, God's blessings on them, and want to follow fools and dullards. They may think those opinions are the secrets held back from the unfit, and their fondness for them would only grow.

So we decided to hint at a small portion of the secret of secrets, to draw such people toward the side of true inquiry, and then turn them back from that road.

Even so, we have not left the secrets we put in these few pages without a thin curtain and a light screen, one that gives way quickly to the person who deserves to pass and thickens for the person who doesn't, so that he never gets past it.

And I ask my brothers who read this to accept my excuse for the things I have been careless in explaining or loose in setting down. I did it only because I was climbing heights where the eye slips when it looks. I wanted to bring the discussion of them close, in a way that would stir desire and longing to enter the road.

I ask God to overlook and forgive, and to bring us to the clear spring of knowing Him. He is generous and gives freely.

And peace be upon you, brother, whom it is our duty to help, and the mercy of God and His blessings.