It is convenient, if inevitably reductive, to describe the arc from superstition to reason in terms of two individual thinkers. On the one hand, we have Plato, whose Theory of Forms argued that every actually existing object in the world was just a pale echo of some pure Type that existed far away, in the unseen heavens. That idealism broadly mirrored the prehistoric transition from animistic or shamanistic religions to theistic belief systems like Christianity and Islam, which installed a “higher truth” invisible to lived experience.