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
"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 himself in his wonderful allegory of the shadow-watchers in The Republic. The trend of his argument is clear; as its shadow is to a solid object, so is the object itself to its archetypal idea. This is the manner in which he presents this thought:
"Imagine a number of men living in an underground cavernous chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from their childhood, with their legs and neck so shackled, that they are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them, and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit their wonders."