Berlin, _September, 1877_. THE WILL IN NATURE. INTRODUCTION. I break silence after seventeen years,[187] in order to point out to the few who, in advance of the age, may have given their attention to my philosophy, sundry corroborations which have been contributed to it by unbiassed empiricists, unacquainted with my writings, who, in pursuing their own road in search of merely empirical knowledge, 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 really to connect themselves and to harmonize with it. Moreover this is not brought about by twisting and straining the empirical sciences in order to adapt them to Metaphysic, nor by Metaphysic having been secretly abstracted from them beforehand and then, _à la_ Schelling, finding _à priori_ what it had learnt _à posteriori_. On the contrary, both meet at the same point of their own accord, yet without collusion. My system therefore, far from soaring above all reality and all experience, descends to the firm ground of actuality, where its lessons are continued by the Physical Sciences. [187] 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 ophthalmologici minores_," _edente_ 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. Now the extraneous and empirical corroborations I am about to bring forward, all concern the kernel and chief point of my doctrine, its Metaphysic proper. They concern, that is, the paradoxical fundamental truth, _that_ what Kant opposed as _thing in itself_ to mere _phenomenon_--called more decidedly by me _representation_--and what he held to be absolutely unknowable, that this _thing in itself_, this substratum of all phenomena, and therefore of the whole of Nature, is nothing but what we know directly and intimately and find within ourselves as _the will_;[188]