كتاب الحيوان (Book of Animals)

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of the fires mixed [within] raise the fine elements of water through their rising and vaporization. When they raise the fine elements, rain and what resembles rain comes from them. That is their habit. That water returns to being salty because when the earth gives it saltiness and the fires extract the freshness and fineness from it, it must return to saltiness. For this reason, sea water is always at one measure and one weight, because the boundaries seek stability. It flows in the depths of the earth, raising the fine elements, so it becomes rain, hail, snow, and dew. Then those downpours return as torrents, seeking the boundaries and seeking stability, and they flow in the depths of the earth until they reach that air. Nothing of that water is lost, and nothing of it is negated; the entities are established. It is as if it were a madman who drowned in a sea and was poured into a channel flowing into that river. It is the work of heat whenever it is in the hollows of firewood, or in the hollows of the earth, or in the hollows of animals.

When heat enters the body, it is something coerced, and the coerced does not cease trying to escape. It does not escape without having taken with it everything it gained power over from what did not resemble it; so when it exits, that thing exits with it. He said: From here the people erred. Abu Ishaq said: The Dahriyya materialists/naturalists spoke in our world with theories. Some of them claimed that this world of ours is [composed] of four pillars: heat, cold, dryness, and moisture, and all other things are results, combinations, and generations, and they made these four bodies. Others claimed that this world is [composed] of four pillars: earth, air, water, and fire, and they made heat, cold, dryness, and moisture accidents in these substances. Then they said regarding all the scents, colors, and sounds: they are the fruits of these four according to the proportions of the mixtures in scarcity and abundance, and in thinness and thickness. They put forward the mention of the share of the sense of the soul referring to internal perception only, and disregarded the shares of the [other] four senses. They said: We find tastes that are nourishing and killing; likewise scents. We find sounds that are delightful and painful, and they are, with that, killing, corrosive to strength, and destructive. We find colors in terms of harms and benefits, delight and pain, in situations that are not unknown, just as we found the same in heat, cold, dryness, and moisture. We have not found earth to be cold and dry, other than that we find it salty or having a color and a taste, whichever it may be; we found it to have a scent and to have a sound when some of it strikes some other. So, the coldness of these bodies, their heat, their dryness, and their moisture were not in them for the sake of the tastes, scents, and colors being in them. Likewise, their tastes, scents, and colors were not in them because of the cold, dryness, heat, and moisture being in them. We found...