Plato, the famous Greek philosopher, taught that the things of the world around us are merely copies or “shadows” of greater, eternal realities. He used a metaphor of people living inside a cave to convey his ideas.
The people inside the cave could not see the world outside the cave; they could only see shadows of people and animals as they passed by. Plato was suggesting that the shadows would seem very real and alive to the people inside the cave, because that was all they had ever seen of the outside world. But these shadows were not the real, living creatures of the outside world; they were merely reflections of them. Plato’s point was that this temporal world is a ___________ of some greater, eternal reality.