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THE AUTHOR S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XIX
self for sordid hire to-day to one, to-morrow to another ;
and the brains of the present generation of savants are
disorganised by Hegelian nonsense : incapable
of reflec
tion, coarse and bewildered, they fall a prey to the low
Materialism which has crept out of the basilisk s egg.
Good speed to them. I return to my subject.
My readers will thus have to get over the difference of
tone in this treatise ; for I could not do here what I had
done in my chief work, that is, give the later additions I
had made in a separate appendix. Besides, it is of no
consequence that people should know what I wrote in my
the only matter
twenty-sixth and what in my sixtieth year ;
of real importance is, that those who wish to find their way
through the fundamental principles of all philosophizing,
to gain a firm footing and a clear insight, should in these
few sheets receive a little volume by which they may learn
something substantial, solid, and true : and this, I hope,
will be the case. From the expansion now given to some
portions, it has even grown into a compendious theory of
the entire faculty of knowing, and this theory, by limiting
itself strictly to the research of the Principle of Sufficient
Reason, shows the matter from a new and peculiar side ;
but then it finds its completion in the First Book of
" The
World as Will and Representation," together with those
chapters of the Second Volume which refer to it, and also
in my Critique of Kantian Philosophy.
FRANKFURT AM MAIN,
September, 1847.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER