Last but not least, author Annie Dillard's essay "Sight into Insight," also demonstrates the same idea by encouraging her readers to not see things with their naked eyes but with their minds in a sense of feeling their surroundings. Authors such as Plato and Thoreau suggest that a large margin of humans only look at the surface of things, but that it is crucial they look deeper into this world, one way being through Dillard's method which is to view the world through the lens of one's mind rather than with the physical feature of the bodily eyes. .
In comparison to Thoreau's idea, Plato does an outstanding job of portraying that humans' eyesight is only meant to skim the surface of things, but not penetrate them for a deeper understanding. Plato's cavemen theory is probably one of the earliest analogies about humans' incapability to see things in depth. In the dialogue of "Allegory of the Cave", Plato asks his readers to imagine a group of prisoners, who were kept in a cave down the Earth. These cavemen have been in the cave ever since birth; they are chained in a manner that they cannot move their heads or legs. Therefore, all of them are forced to look straight ahead which is a wall. Behind the prisoner is fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised stone bridge. However, there are puppets in the form of humans, animals walking across the bridge. Reasonably, these figures create shadows that would be reflected on the wall that these prisoners are staring at. Since the flickering images on the wall are the only thing these prisoners can see, no one would doubt their reality. Plato then offered a plot twist to his idea, by giving one of the prisoners his freedom he is able to escape the cave and look at the real world. The dazzling light of the sun nearly blinds him as he tries to see more, and just as his eyes adapt to the harsh lights, so does his mind to the actual realities of the world.