Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

14So much will suffice for recounting the imagined education devised by Avicenna. Let us next sketch briefly the kind of education our Plato describes in the seventh book of the Republic. ‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘a cave beneath the earth. Imagine people raised there from childhood, with their necks and hands bound behind them and their feet fastened to pillars, so that they can neither move anywhere nor look at anything except what appears before them on the facing wall of the cave. Behind them, high above, let a lamp burn; and between the lamp and those who are bound let many other people walk about and speak with one another, carrying in their hands various images of trees and animals. Those bound in this way will never in reality see either themselves or any of the other things we have described. They will see only their own shadows or those of the others, cast before their eyes upon the opposite wall of the cave by the fire burning behind them. Consequently they will believe that they themselves are nothing other than their own shadows, and that other things are nothing other than the shadows of those objects; or they will suppose that light itself is nothing other than that faint reflection which appears there.’