After its burial, the impression of his loneliness and of his dependence upon himself being deepened, he quickly develops his faculties. In a short time he becomes an expert in different sports, as hunting and fishing. He makes himself clothes and shoes of the skins of wild beasts. By the observations he made upon the swallows’ nests, being taught the art of building, he builds with his hands a room for his own use, a store-house, and a pantry. Then he contrives to make some wild horses so tractable that he can use them for riding, which is a great help to him in his expeditions and excursions.
His material existence thus once firmly established and secured, he begins to indulge in his speculations on all sorts of bodies,--on the different kinds of animals, plants, minerals and different sorts of stones, earth, water, exhalations and vapours, ice, snow, hail, smoke, fire, etc.
By the time he attains to the age of twenty-eight (fourth Septenary), his mind starts to ponder over astronomical problems--over heaven and stars, sun and moon; and in the end comes to the conclusion that the body of heaven is finite and is of a spherical figure.
At last his mind finds itself occupied with the great problem of Creation and Creator. With admirable skill the author delineates here the gradual development of Hayy’s reasonings on the Creator and Mover of the world, and concludes with the panegyric words of the Koran: _He is the Existence, He is the Absoluteness, He is the Perfection, He is the Beauty, He is the Glory, He is the Power, He is the Knowledge, He is He, and all Things perish beside Him._
All his thoughts were henceforward confined to the contemplation of this necessarily self-existent Being. In order to do this, he removed all his affections from sensible things, shut his eyes, stopped his ears, and refrained himself as much as possible from following his imagination, endeavouring to the utmost to think of nothing besides him.
Whilst so, on the one side, the imagination and all the other faculties which make any use of the organs of the body grew weak; on the other side, the operations of his essence which did not depend upon the body grew strong, so that sometimes his meditation was pure and free from any mixture, and he beheld thereby the necessarily self-existent Being; but then again corporeal faculties would return upon him and spoil his contemplation, and bring him down to the lowest degree.