The Philosophy of the Upanishads c10.s5.t2.1

c10.s5.t2.1

As there can be, to use popular language, only one God and no more, so it is involved in the nature of a philosophical principle to be a unity, from which the variety of the phenomenal universe is derived. It follows that monism is the natural standpoint of philosophy, and wherever dualism has appeared in its history it has always been the consequence of antecedent stress and difficulty, and as it were a symptom of the wane of the philosophising spirit; just as the dualism of Empedokles, Anaxagoras and Democritus was occasioned by the apparently irreconcilable opposition of the doctrines of Heracleitus and Parmenides, and the dualism of Descartes had its ultimate source in the unnatural separation of the abstract and the concrete representations (*cogitatio* and *extensio*), which began with Plato and Aristotle. In a similar way the dualism of the Sāṅkhya doctrine also cannot be regarded as a primitive view of nature; for how should two principles like *purusha* and *prakṛiti*, distinct from first to last, be accidentally lighted upon in infinite space and infinite time, and further be so marvellously suited to one another that they could unite to evolve a universe? The result attained is rather to be conceived as the consequence of a natural disintegration of the doctrine of the Upanishads, as we propose now to show.