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Shelly and Plato-Immortal in mortality.
AN EPITOME OF JAINISM. paternal spermatazoon. One cannot see how a
being that has thus a beginning of existence and can afterwards prove to be immortal.”
(The italics are ours :). Such is the idea of the soul and its immortality according to the researches of Modern science in the west ; but there is nothing new in it. The idea such an origin and nature of the soul is traceable as far back as Plato's time and since 'to the pure, all things are pure', it will not be labour lost to inform our readers, by the way, that the most famous lines,
"All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle" in Shelley's 'Love Philosophy' contain an unmistakable reference to the passage of Platoe's Symposium which Shelley himself translates as follows (see Shelley's Prose Works, Ed. R. H. Shepherd, Vo, II, p. 95): --"The intercourse of the male and the female in generation, a divine work, through pregnancy and production, it were some. thing immortal in mortality." Similar ideas occur also, it would be interesting to note, in the concluding portions of the 'Brihadåranyaka Upanishat' of the Hindus.
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