Hayy ibn Yaqzan
An infant alone on an equatorial island, set adrift there in a chest or generated from the clay itself, the book offers both accounts, is suckled by a gazelle, opens her body when she dies to find what has left it, and works out for himself fire, clothing, the motions of the spheres, and at last the existence of a necessary being. From a neighboring island, where those same truths are held as revealed law and enforced as such, a visitor arrives at the end of that reasoning. Ibn Tufayl's Andalusian philosophical tale, Latinized in 1671 as Philosophus Autodidactus and in English by 1708, stands behind both the European desert-island book and the Enlightenment case for natural religion.
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