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prefacio Editor's Preface In his will of 26 June 1852 Arthur Schopenhauer left to Julius Frauen- städt, his disciple and later editor, his own personal interleaved copies of his works and his systematized and classified manuscripts. Schopen- hauer's own personal copies with their written alterations and additions furnished the basis for the new editions of his works which would be taken care of by the author himself and, after his death, by Frauenstädt. Most of them are missing. But the manuscripts formed the real store- house of Schopenhauer's thinking and contain his philosophical sketches covering the half-century from his student days right up to his death in 1860. From them he drew ideas for all his works since his Dissertation of 1813; from them there also came to a large extent the supplements with which he enlarged and enriched new editions of those works. In this respect the earliest manuscripts were just as important as the latest; again and again right to the very end he drew from them all. We know that Schopenhauer saw a great merit of his philosophy in the fact that its truths fitted freely and easily into an organic structure of ideas which was complete in itself. The manuscripts show how this early conceived unity was built up in detail out of many parts. They make us look back to the original experiences and reflections out of which the system was gradually brought to maturity and perfection. In aphoristic ease and without any stated order the ideas press forward, sometimes they are withdrawn the very next moment - "all this is not true", it says, or "this is incorrect", or "it won't do", or "this first of all", or even more caustically: "this essay is still very crude and not mentally assimilated". But then from positions already abandoned a fresh questioning, a new search may begin and lead to clarification. We thus observe the growth and development of the system up to the appearance in 1818 of the principal work, The World as Will and Representation, with which a complete form is reached. And then there begins the work of further extending his world of ideas. More and more do the sketches receive a different aspect. There are no longer any doubts, no longer any labouring for the well-founded idea, for the precise and clear-cut expression. An attitude that directs and inexorably distinguishes the true from the false now determines every statement. But everything, the early search and the later vindication and verifi- cation of himself, the energy of the first conceptions and the superior maturity of old age, all these serve merely to develop the single idea which appears with ever greater clearness in parallel courses of obser- vation and which is reduced to the concisest formula in the title of the -vii-