rs 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