One morning, Willoughby, calling on Atherton, found him and Gower looking over an old-fashioned little volume.
Willoughby. What have you there, Atherton?
Atherton. A curious old book—The History of Hai Ebn Yokhdan, by Abu Jaafer Ebn Tophail—an Arabian philosopher of Spain, writing in the twelfth or thirteenth century: ‘done into English’ by Simon Ockley.
Gower (to Willoughby). I happened to be looking through Barclay’s Apology—found him referring to this History of Yokhdan; and, behold, Atherton fetches me down, from one of his topmost dust-of-erudition strata there, the very book. It appears that good Barclay was so hard put to it, to find examples for the support of his doctrine concerning the Universal and Saving Light, that he has pressed this shadowy philosophical romance into the service, as an able-bodied unexceptionable fact:—sets up a fanciful ornament from the Moorish arabesques of Toledo as a bulwark for his theory.
Willoughby. Who, then, may this Hai Ebn Yokhdan be?
Atherton. Simply a mystical Robinson Crusoe. The book relates how a child was exposed in an ark upon the sea, drifted to a Fortunate Island in the Indian Ocean, was there suckled by a roe, dresses himself with skins and feathers, builds a hut, tames a horse, rises to the discovery of ‘One supreme and necessarily self-existent Being,’ and does, at last, by due abstinence and exclusion of all external objects, attain to a mystical intuition of Him—a contemplation of the divine essence, and a consciousness that his own essence, thus lost in God, is itself divine:—all this, by the unaided inner Light. A Mussulman hermit who is landed on the island, there to retire from mankind, finds him; teaches him to speak; and discovers, to his devout amazement, that this Ebn Yokhdan has attained, first by deduction from the external world, and then, abandoning that, by immediate intuition, to the very truth concerning God which he has learnt through the medium of the Koran—the tee-totum mysticism of spinning dervishes included.[[374]]
Gower. Barclay, citing his Arab, points the moral as teaching ‘that the best and most certain knowledge of God, is not that which is attained by premises premised, and conclusions deduced; but that which is enjoyed by conjunction of the Mind of Man with the Supreme Intellect, after the mind is purified from its corruption and is separated from all bodily images, and is gathered into a profound stillness.’[[375]]
Willoughby. And the simple-hearted apologist of the Friends never suspected that this story was a philosopher’s conjecture—Abu Tophail’s ideal of what the inner light might be supposed to teach a man, in total seclusion?
Atherton. Not he. At any rate, Yokhdan figures in the first half-dozen editions of the Apology. I believe, in none later.
Gower. A curious sight, to see the Arabian Sufi and the English Quaker keeping company so lovingly.