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THE WILL IN NATURE.
INTRODUCTION.
IBEEAK silence after seventeen years, 1
in order to
point out to the few who, in advance of the age, may
have given their attention to my philosophy, sundry cor-
roborations which have been contributed to it by unbiassed
empiricists, unacquainted with my writings, who, in pur
suing their own road in search of merely empirical know
ledge, discovered at its extreme end what my doctrine has
propounded as the Metaphysical (das Metaphysische), from
which the explanation of experience as a whole must come.
This circumstance is the more encouraging, as it confers
upon my system a distinction over all hitherto existing
ones ; for all the other systems, even the latest that of
Kant still leave a wide gap between their results and
experience, and are far from coming down directly to, and
into contact with, experience. By this my Metaphysic
proves itself to be the only one having an extreme point
in common with the physical sciences : a point up to which
these sciences come to meet it by their own paths, so as
1 So had I written in 1835, when the present treatise was first com
posed, having published nothing since 1818, before the close of which
;
" Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
year
had appeared. For a Latin
version, which I had added to the third volume of" Scriptores ophthalmo-
logici minores" edentc J. Radio, in 1830, for the benefit of my foreign
readers, of my treatise "On Vision and Colours" (published in 1816),
can hardly be said to break the silence of that pause.