كتاب الحيوان (Book of Animals)

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and smoke, and some of the air connected to it transmuted into water, and some transmuted into fire according to the strength of the factors and the opposites present. If a proponent of accidents a scholar of the kalām tradition, likely referencing atomic theory says this, he has answered according to his current status. This is one chapter of the discourse on fire, and we must investigate it for both parties. God is the Helper. (Another Chapter): Some who deny that fire is latent in firewood say that this heat we see appearing from the wood—if it were actually in the wood, it would be necessary for anyone who touched it to feel it, like glowing embers when there is no barrier. If there were a barrier, it could only be coldness, because color, taste, and smell do not obstruct heat. That which opposes heat does not merely differ from it; it must actually oppose it. If someone claims that there were portions of coldness there that equaled that heat, countering, balancing, and paralleling it, then that is why we did not find the wood harmful when we touched it. They argue that the burning only appears when the coldness vanishes, allowing the heat to stand alone and show its effect. But if the coldness balancing that heat were permanently resident in the wood by its very nature, then whoever touched the ash with their hand should find it colder than ice. Since touching it is like touching anything else, we know there is no coldness there equivalent to this heat, which burns everything it encounters. If they claim that both heat and cold exited the wood together, why did we find the heat alone? It is not more entitled to be felt than its opposite. If the cold went north and the heat went south, the cold should have extinguished and destroyed whatever it met, just as the heat destroyed, burned, and dissolved whatever it met. They said: Since we have found all the divisions of this category, we know that fire was not latent in the firewood.

Abu Ishaq says: The answer to this is that we claim the lower world is dominated by water and earth, both of which are cold. In their depths and their weaknesses lies heat that is habitable but not thriving, suppressed but not dormant, because there is little of it, and the little is base, and the base is strange, and the strange is despised. When the lower world is thus, the force of coldness within it occurs. That coldness, which was in the wood, vanishes when its barrier is removed because the wood resides in this world. This coldness does not cut off to the coldness of the earth—which is like an accident to it—except through a jump and a shattering of things in places and their proximity. The coldness of water stands in the place of the sun's disk regarding the light that enters a house through a hole in it; if the hole is blocked, the light is cut off from the disk and the source of its essence. When Abu Ishaq answers with this...