Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Primary Sources • 253itself. But the fact that the clay was never totally devoid of dimensionsmade it clear to him that they were part of its being [as clay].His experiments led him to believe that all bodies are composedof two things: (i) a thing similar to clay in his experiment on the clay,and (ii) the three extensions (length, width, and depth) of the forminto which clay or any other object is formed. This could be a ball, ablock, or another figure the clay might have. Thus, he realized thathe could not comprehend physical things at all unless he conceivedof them as compounded of these two factors, neither of which couldsubsist without the other.He deduced that there is a variable factor—the form of the bodies.This can have many different faces, and three properties of extension(length, width, and depth) correspond to this form. The other factor,which remains constant like the clay of the example, corresponds tomateriality in all other bodies. In philosophy the factor analogous tothe clay is called hyle,or matter. This is pure matter, devoid of forms.Now that his thinking had achieved a certain level ofsophistication and he could use the faculties of his mind, he feltalien and alone because the sensory world had now receded to someextent. This produced a longing for the familiar world of the senses.He disliked the notion of the unqualified body—a thing he couldneither possess nor hold. He reverted to the four simple objects hehad already examined.First he reexamined water. He found that when left to itself, in itsown natural form, it was cold and moved downward; but if warmed byfire or the heat of the sun, its coldness departed, only its tendency tofall re mained as its property. If it were heated vigorously, this secondproperty also disappeared; in fact, now [water] gained the [opposite]tendency: it rose upward. In this way, both primary properties of waterwere changed. He concluded that once the two original propertieswere gone, the form of water must have left this body, since it nowexhibited behavior character istic of some other form. Hence, a newform, not previously present, must have come into existence, givingrise to behavior unlike that it had shown under its original form.Hayy now knew for sure that all that comes into existence musthave a cause. A vague and diffused notion of cause of forms nowappeared to him. He went over the forms he had known beforeand realized that all of these forms had come into existence due to