كتاب الحيوان (Book of Animals)

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to some of its parts, and then it is never found to be anything but either higher or lower. (Abu Ishaq said): Thus it is inferred that light is lighter than heat because of its disappearance, for the light of the furnace has departed while its heat remains. Abu Ishaq said: It is for a reason that air is constrained in the hollow of this sphere, and every constrained [thing] must have its overturning and pressure in accordance with the intensity of the constraint; likewise water when it is suffocated. He said: Wind is nothing but air left alone. So why did they judge the nature of air in its essence as having plasticity, while the air that is near the sun and the air that is between them are the opposite of that? Were it not that the forces of cold are innate in it, it would not be a relief for souls, and a ventilator for all animals when the vapor and the harmful heat are suffocated in their hollows, until they flee to it and seek its help, and they start to draw from its spirit and the coldness of its breeze in the weight of what went out of the thick vapor.

And the heat that is lodged [within]. He said: They have known what is in dryness of hostility and difference. A people claimed that dryness is only the absence of moisture. They said: In accordance with the [amount of] moisture, names have transformed upon it. Until their opponent said: "So say also that we only find the body cold in accordance with the scarcity of heat in it." Likewise, they said in speech that air only appears to us as darkness due to the loss of light, and because light is an existing disk and a radiating, distinct ray, and darkness has no disk. If there were in this world something called darkness, it would not exist except in a disk. So how can there be a disk for the earth, and the earth is dusty? And the ray of a thing should not be more encompassing than it. He said: The first [argument] does not resemble the statement on dryness and moisture, and the statement on heat and cold, and the statement on dryness and moisture, and the statement on roughness and smoothness. Because if soil were entirely dry, and the dryness were common in all its parts, no part of it would be more deserving of breaking apart, cooling, and crumbling than the part we find holding together. His opponent said: "And if it were also the case that the crumbling we find in it is only due to the absence of moisture, and all of it has lacked moisture, then the whole [thing] should be crumbling. And we do not find two parts of it sticking together." If you claim that it only differs in crumbling according to the difference of dryness, you should make dryness into layers, just as that is done for greenness and yellowness. Ibrahim said: "Do you see, if the dryness—which is the ultimate [state] of soil—encompassed everything just as it happened to half of it, would it not be necessary for the separation to affect everything?" And in that is the statement regarding the juz' alladhi la yatajazza' the indivisible part/atom. Abu Ishaq, even if he objected to these people in the chapter regarding the statement on dryness, the problem is upon him, and that is more severe. And Abu Ishaq was...