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This is a new edition of a book well known in the history of philosophy. The author wrote it at the age of twenty-six under the inspiration of a good idea that had occurred to him, the story of which, however, forms one of the most pathetic failures in the history of science. The idea was that there might be unconscious forces at work moulding man's behaviour and destiny. The book itself had a considerable vogue in the third quarter of the last century, whether because of an intuitive response to the title or from the revival at that time of interest in German philosophy, it is now hard to say. Actually, the idea inspired no one to further work and proved quite infertile. One cannot say it fell flat, since its fate was more interesting than that. The truth was that the author of the idea unfortunately did not allow it to be accompanied by a necessary companion idea, namely, actually to investigate the unconscious itself; or else, perhaps, it was that he could not devise any means of doing so. At all events, his interest in it as a part of reality was rapidly exchanged for the possibility of the idea being made the basis of a highly speculative structure, a philosophy of the universe. His first book, the one before us, large as it is, is almost entirely devoted to this superstructure, which he then further elaborated in thirty succeeding ponderous tomes.
The book first appeared in 1868, and the present translation was made from the German edition of 1884. We imagine that at the present time there must be few whose antiquarian interests are potent enough to enable them to read through the whole of this volume, and one cannot help wondering why in these circumstances the volume has been incorporated into the International Library of 'Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method, ' edited by C. K. Ogden. Possibly the reason may be discerned in the following passage from the Editorial Preface: 'The doctrine of the