On the other hand, to send a juvenile work like this once more into the world with all its faults and blemishes, seemed to me unjustifiable. For I am aware that the time cannot be very far off when all correction will be impossible; but with that time the period of my real influence will commence, and this period, I trust, will be a long one, for I firmly rely upon Seneca's promise: "Etiamsi omnibus tecum viventibus silentium livor indixerit; venient qui sine offensa, sine gratia judicent."[5] I have done what I could, therefore, to improve this work of my youth, and, considering the brevity and uncertainty of life, I must even regard it as an especially fortunate circumstance, to have been thus permitted to correct in my sixtieth year what I had written in my twenty-sixth.
Nevertheless, while doing this, I meant to deal leniently with my younger self, and to let him discourse, nay, even speak his mind freely, wherever it was possible. But wherever he had advanced what was incorrect or superfluous, or had even left out the best part, I have been obliged to interrupt the thread of his discourse. And this has happened often enough; so often, indeed, that some of my readers may perhaps think they hear an old man reading a young man's book aloud, while he frequently lets it drop, in order to indulge in digressions of his own on the same subject.
It is easy to see that a work thus corrected after so long an interval, could never acquire the unity and rounded completeness which only belong to such as are written in one breath. So great a difference will be found even in style and expression, that no reader of any tact can ever be in doubt whether it be the older or younger man who is speaking. For the contrast is indeed striking between the mild, unassuming tone in which the youth—who is still simple enough to believe quite seriously that for all whose pursuit is philosophy, truth, and truth alone, can have importance, and therefore that whoever promotes truth is sure of a welcome from them—propounds his arguments with confidence, and the firm, but also at times somewhat harsh voice of the old man, who in course of time has necessarily discovered the true character and real aims of the noble company of mercenary time-servers into which he has fallen. Nay, the just reader will hardly find fault with him should he occasionally give free vent to his indignation; since we see what comes of it when people who profess to have truth for their sole aim, are always occupied in studying the purposes of their powerful superiors, and when the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius is extended even to the greatest philosophers, and a clumsy charlatan, like Hegel, is calmly classed among them? Verily German Philosophy stands before us loaded with contempt, the laughing-stock of other nations, expelled from all honest science—like the prostitute who sells herself 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 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.
Arthur Schopenhauer.
Frankfurt am Main,
September, 1847.
EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
In the present volume I lay before the public the Third Edition of the "Fourfold Root," including the emendations and additions left by Schopenhauer in his own interleaved copy. I have already had occasion elsewhere to relate that he left copies of all his works thus interleaved, and that he was wont to jot down on these fly-leaves any corrections and additions he might intend inserting in future editions.
Schopenhauer himself prepared for the press all that has been added in the present edition, for he has indicated, by signs in the original context corresponding to other similar signs in the MS. passages, the places where he wished his additions to be inserted. All that was left for me to do, was to give in extended form a few citations he had purposed adding.