On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)
Schopenhauer · en
"Es will der Spitz aus unserm Stall
Uns immerfort begleiten:
Doch seines Bellens lauter Schall
Beweist nur, dass wir reiten."
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER.
FRANKFURT AM MEIN,
_August, 1854_.
[185] I take this opportunity urgently to request that the public
will not believe unconditionally any accounts of what I am supposed
to have said, even when they are given as quotations; but will
first verify the existence of these quotations in my works. In this
way many a falsehood will be detected, which can however only be
stamped as a direct forgery when accompanied by quotation marks
(""). [Add. to 3rd ed.]
EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Schopenhauer has left an interleaved copy of his work "On the Will
in Nature," as well as of his other writings, and has inserted in it
those Corrections and Additions which he intended to use for the Third
Edition. I have therefore included them in this Third Edition.
The Corrections chiefly concern the style, here and there an expression
being changed, and a word inserted or omitted. The Additions, on the
contrary, concern the _matter_ of the book; they amplify it more or
less considerably, and are tolerably numerous.
The Corrections are incorporated by Schopenhauer with the text; whereas
the Additions are designated by him as "Notes" (_Anmerkungen_) to be
placed at the foot of the pages with the words, "added to the third
edition." They will therefore be found at the places indicated by him
for them, as foot-notes; and thus the reader will be enabled easily to
discern how much has been added in this edition.
As to the value of the present work, Schopenhauer has expressed himself
as follows in the "World as Will and Representation:"
"It would be a great mistake to consider the foreign deliverances with
which I have connected my own exposition there (in the work "On the
Will in Nature") as the real substance and argument of that work which,
though small in size, is weighty in import. They are rather a mere
occasion which I take as my starting-point in order to expound the
fundamental truth of my doctrine more clearly there than has been done
anywhere else, and to apply it all the way down even to the empirical
knowledge of Nature. This I have done most exhaustively and stringently
under the heading "Physical Astronomy," nor can I ever hope to find a
more correct or accurate expression for the kernel of my doctrine than
the one given there."[186]
[186] "Die Welt a. W. u. V.," vol. ii., c. 18, p. 213.
I have nothing to add to testimony thus given by Schopenhauer himself.
JULIUS FRAUENSTÄDT.
Berlin, _March, 1867_.
EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.
The present Fourth Edition is an identical reprint of the Third:
it therefore contains the same Corrections and Additions which I
had already inserted in the Third Edition from Schopenhauer's own
manuscript.
JULIUS FRAUENSTÄDT.