The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.81

v2.c41.81

We have in fact to admit that the human spirit, in virtue of its character, is able to produce in different parts of the world systems which agree in large measure, without borrowing by one side from the other. The stress laid in the cave metaphor in the *Republic* by Plato, as by Parmenides, on the relative unreality of the world of sense and experience bears a certain similarity to the conception of the Brahman as alone real, but Plato was the inheritor of the Sophists and Sokrates, and as a result his philosophy is something vitally distinct from any known to India. The metaphor of the chariot and its steeds in the *Phaidros* has, as we have seen, an interesting parallel in the Kaṭha, but the details of the two are perfectly distinct, for Plato uses the conception to illustrate the struggle between the rational and the irrational elements in the soul, and his distinction of θυμός and ἐπιθυμία has no real parallel in the Upaniṣads. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad¹ we hear of procreation as the result of the desire for reunion of the two halves of the primitive being, divided by Prajāpati into man and woman. The brilliant myth in the *Symposion* of Plato has been compared by Deussen,² who argues that the view departs from truth merely in that it places in the past what lies in the future, for the being that brings together man and woman is the child that is to be born. The two passages must certainly be independent, and afford an excellent instance of what parallelisms can be adduced.