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

"Parmenides," says Hinton, "and the Asiatic thinkers with whom he is
in close affinity, propound a theory of existence which is in close
accord with a conception of a possible relation between a higher and
a lower-dimensional space." He concludes, "Either one of two things
must be true, that four-dimensional conceptions give a wonderful
power of representing the thought of the East, or that the thinkers
of the East must have been looking at and regarding four-dimensional
existence."

It would not be difficult to re-state, in terms of our hypothesis,
Plato's doctrine of an enduring archetypal world of ideas reflected
in a world of transitory images and appearances. Fortunately, Plato
has relieved the author of that necessity by doing it