“Unquestionably they would refer it to that.”

“Then surely such persons would hold the shadows of the manufactured articles to be the only realities.”

“Without a doubt they would.”

Plato (in the person of Socrates) then considers what would happen if the course of nature brought to the prisoners a release from their fetters and a remedy for their foolishness, and concludes as follows: 

“Now this imaginary case, my dear Glaucon, you must apply in all its parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the eye reveals, to the prison-house, and the light of the fire therein to the power of the sun; and if, by the upward ascent and the contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of the soul in the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of my own surmises ... the view which I take of the subject is to the following effect.”

Briefly, the view taken is that the “Form of Good” perceived by the mind is the source of everything that is perceived by the senses.  This is equivalent to saying that the objects of our three-space world are projections of higher-dimensional realities—­that there is a supernal world related to this world as a body is related to the shadow which it casts.

SWEDENBORG

Emerson, in his Representative Men, chose Swedenborg as the representative mystic.  He accepted Swedenborg’s way of looking at the world as universally characteristic of the mystical temperament.  The Higher Space Theory was unheard of in Swedenborg’s day, nevertheless in his religious writings—­thick clouds shot with lightning—­the idea is implicit and sometimes even expressed, though in a terminology all his own.

To Swedenborg’s vision, as to Plato’s, this physical world is a world of ultimates, in all things correspondent to the casual world, which he names “heaven.” “It is to be observed,” he says, “that the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect exists from its efficient cause.”

According to Swedenborg, conditions in “heaven” are different from those in the world:  space is different:  distance is different He says, “Space in heaven is not like space in the world, for space in the world is fixed, and therefore measurable:  but in heaven it is not fixed and therefore cannot be measured.”

Herein is suggested a fluidic condition, singularly in accord with certain modern conceptions in theoretical physics.  Commenting upon the significance of Lobatchewsky’s and Bolyai’s work along the lines of non-Euclidian geometry, Hinton says, “By immersing the conception of distance in matter, to which it properly belongs, it promises to be of the greatest aid in analysis, for the effective distance of any two particles is the result of complex material conditions, and cannot be measured by hard and fast rules.”