The work of August Gladitsch (Einleitung in das Verständniss der Weltgeschichte, Posen, 1841) contains an instructive comparison between the Gymnosophists and the Cynics, as well as between the Pythagoreans and the Chinese philosophers--between the Eleatic sect and the Hindoo philosophers. The points of analogy, both in doctrine and practice, are very numerous and strikingly brought out, pp. 356-377. I cannot, however, agree in his conclusion, that the doctrines and practice of Antisthenes were borrowed, not from Sokrates with exaggeration, but from the Parmenidean theory, and the Vedanta theory of the Ens Unum, leading to negation and contempt of the phenomenal world.] [Side-note: The precepts and principles laid down by Sokrates were carried into fullest execution by the Cynics.] These observations of the Indian Gymnosophist are a reproduction and an application in practice[114] of the memorable declaration of principle enunciated by Sokrates--"That the Gods had no wants: and that the man who had fewest wants, approximated most nearly to the Gods". This principle is first introduced into Grecian ethics by Sokrates: ascribed to him both by Xenophon and Plato, and seemingly approved by both. In his life, too, Sokrates carried the principle into effect, up to a certain point. Both admirers and opponents attest his poverty, hard fare, coarse clothing, endurance of cold and privation:[115] but he was a family man, with a wife and children to maintain, and he partook occasionally, of indulgences which made him fall short of his own ascetic principle. Plato and Xenophon--both of them well-born Athenians, in circumstances affluent, or at least easy, the latter being a knight, and even highly skilled in horses and horsemanship--contented themselves with preaching on the text, whenever they had to deal with an opponent more self-indulgent than themselves; but made no attempt to carry it into practice.[116] Zeno the Stoic laid down broad principles of self-denial and apathy: but in practice he was unable to conquer the sense of shame, as the Cynics did, and still more the Gymnosophists. Antisthenes, on the other hand, took to heart, both in word and act, the principle of Sokrates: yet even he, as we know from the Xenophontic Symposion, was not altogether constant in rigorous austerity. His successors Diogenes and Krates attained the maximum of perfection ever displayed by the Cynics of free Greece. They stood forth as examples of endurance, abnegation--insensibility to shame and fear--free-spoken censure of others. Even they however were not so recognised by the Indian Gymnosophists; who, having reduced their wants, their fears, and their sensibilities, yet lower, had thus come nearer to that which they called the perfection of Nature, and which Sokrates called the close approach to divinity.[117] When Alexander the Great (in the first year of his reign and prior to any of his Asiatic conquests) visited Diogenes at