Hayy understood that the heavens and all that is in them are, as it were, one being whose parts are all interconnected. All the bodies he had known before such as earth, water, air, plants and animals were enclosed within this being and never left it. The whole was like an animal.139 The light-giving stars were its senses. The spheres, articulated one to the next, were its limbs. And the world of generation and decay within was like the juices and wastes in the beast’s belly, where smaller animals often breed, as in the macrocosm.
