The Kingdom of God is an intelligible world

Intelligibility is what can be comprehended by the human mind in contrast to sense perception. The intelligible method is thought thinking itself, or the human mind reflecting on itself.

These affections are described in succession as corresponding to increasing levels of reality and truth from conjecture (εἰκασία) to belief (πίστις) to thought (διάνοια) and finally to understanding (νόησις).

However the Absolute is generally regarded as being only partially intelligible. The Absolute is the idea of an unconditional reality which transcends limited, conditional, everyday existence. It is sometimes used as a term for God or the Divine. Other similar concepts are The One and First Cause.

The visible world

Thus AB represents shadows and reflections of physical things, and BC the physical things themselves. These correspond to two kinds of knowledge, the illusion (εἰκασία eikasia) of our ordinary, everyday experience, and belief (πίστις pistis) about discrete physical objects which cast their shadows.^[4] In the Timaeus, the category of illusion includes all the "opinions of which the minds of ordinary people are full," while the natural sciences are included in the category of belief.^[4]

The intelligible world

According to some translations,^[2] the segment CE, representing the intelligible world, is divided into the same ratio as AC, giving the subdivisions CD and DE (it can be readily verified that CD must have the same length as BC:^[5]

There are two subdivisions, in the lower of which the soul uses the figures given by the former division as images; the enquiry can only be hypothetical, and instead of going upwards to a principle descends to the other end; in the higher of the two, the soul passes out of hypotheses, and goes up to a principle which is above hypotheses, making no use of images as in the former case, but proceeding only in and through the ideas themselves (510b).^[3]