PLATO evidently had this in mind when he imagined the life of men spent in cave-walled prisons in which their bodies were so fixed that they were compelled to sit in one prescribed position, and therefore, be unable to see anything except the shadows of persons or objects as they passed by. He conceived that men thus conditioned would, in time, suffer the diminution of their scope of consciousness to such an extent as to reduce it to identification with the shadows on the walls. Their consciousness would be mere shadow-consciousnesses the entire data of which would be shadowgraphs. So that for them the only reality would be the shadows which they constantly saw. A similar thing really happens to man's consciousness limited to the plane of the objective world. Things which are not objective do not appear as real to him, if they do appear at all. It is not that there are no other realities than those which appear to the egopsychic consciousness or that fall within its scope; but that this form of consciousness is incompetent to judge of the nature and appearance of those realities which do not answer to the limitations under which it exists. And so, with men whose data of consciousness or whose outlook upon the world of facts, or rather life, are confined to the narrow bounds of mathematic rigor and exclusiveness, there may appear to exist no realities which may not be defined in the terms of mathematics. Similarly, to the empiricist, used to measurements of magnitudes, weights, and rates of motion, there may also appear to be no realities which are not amenable to the mold of his empirical contrivances--the balance, the chromatic and the scalpel. All of these are shadow men constricted to the metes and bounds of shadows which they observe only because they are ignorant of the realities which lie without their plane. Life has so many ways of exhibiting its remains to the intellect; and these remains have so many facets or viewpoints from which they may be studied, that nothing short of a panoramic view of all the modes of exhibition and of all the facets and angles of appearances will suffice to present a trustworthy and comprehensive view of the whole. Then, life itself is so illusive, so unseizable by the intellect that the testimony of all investigators are required to summarize its modes of appearance. And, therefore, eventual contentment shall be secured only when the mass of diverse testimonies is reduced to the lowest common divisor, and for this purpose the operations of every class of investigators must be viewed as the work of specialists upon separate phases, facets and angles of life's remains.