self for sordid hire today to one, tomorrow to another; and the brains of the present generation of savants are disorganised by Hegelian nonsense: incapable of reflection, 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 twenty-sixth and what in my sixtieth year; the only matter 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.
