does not ordinarily concern its steering.  And thus with regard to ourselves all those movements and activities which characterize our bodily organs are three-dimensional; we never need to consider the ampler movements.  But we do more than use these movements of our body to effect our aims by direct means; we have now come to the pass when we act indirectly on nature, when we call processes into play which lie beyond the reach of any explanation we can give by the kind of thought which has been sufficient for the steering of our craft as a whole.

“When we come to the problem of what goes on in the minute and apply ourselves to the mechanism of the minute, we find our habitual conceptions inadequate.  The captain in us must wake up to his own intimate nature, realize those functions of movement which are his own, and in the virtue of his knowledge of them apprehend how to deal with the problems he has come to.”

  The Fourth Dimension.

How more accurately and eloquently could “the captain in us,” momentarily aroused, give voice to his predicament, than in the words, “Instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the breast.”

DIRECT VISION

The “watery spheres” in the Hermetic fragment are of course the eyes, a mechanism inferior in many ways to the camera of man’s own devising.  The phenomena of clairvoyance make known a mode of vision which is confined to no specific sense organ, approximating much more closely to true perception than does physical sight.  Mr. C.W.  Leadbeater in Clairvoyance specifically affirms that this higher power of sight is four-dimensional.  He says:  “The idea of the fourth dimension as expounded by Mr. Hinton is the only one which gives any kind of explanation down here of astral vision ... which lays every point in the interior of a solid body absolutely open to the gaze of the seer, just as every point of the interior of a circle lies open to the gaze of a man looking down upon it.”  “I can see all around and every way,” exclaims one of the psychometers reported in William Denton’s The Soul of Things.

The “outer light” by which the physical eye is able to see objects is sunlight.  Upon this clairvoyant vision in no wise depends, involving, as it does, other octaves of vibration.  We should be able to receive ideas of this order without incredulity since the advent of “dark” photography and the ultra-violet microscope.  By aid of the latter, photographs are taken in absolute darkness, the lenses used being transparent to light rays invisible to the eye, but active photographically.

The foregoing passages from The Virgin of the World show a remarkable resemblance between the Hermetic philosophy and modern higher-space thought.  The parallelism is not less striking in the case of certain other mystic philosophers of the East.

PLATO’S SHADOW-WATCHERS