THE WILL IN NATURE.
INTRODUCTION.
I break silence after seventeen years,[1] in order to point out, to the few who are in advance of the age and may have given their attention to my philosophy, sundry corroborations which have been contributed to it by unbiassed empiricists who are unacquainted with my writings, and who, in pursuing 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
- ↑ So had I written in 1835, when the present treatise was first composed, having published nothing since 1818, before the close of which year "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" had appeared. For a Latin version, which I had added to the third volume of "Scriptores ophthalmo logici minores," edente by J. Radius, 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.
