PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
At the close of an undertaking which, from the first brief sketch to the final shaping of a complete work of quite unforeseen dimensions, has spread itself over ten years, it will not be out of place to glance back at what I intended and what I have achieved, my standpoint then and my standpoint to-day.
In the Introduction to the 1918 edition — inwardly and outwardly a fragment — I stated my conviction that an idea had now been irrefutably formulated which no one would oppose, once the idea had been put into words. I ought to have said once that idea had been understood. And for that we must look — as I more and more realize — not only in this instance but in the whole history of thought — to the new generation that is born with the ability to do it.
I added that this must be considered as a first attempt, loaded with all the customary faults, incomplete and not without inward opposition. The remark was not taken anything like as seriously as it was intended. Those who have looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought will know that it is not given to us to gain insight into the fundamental principles of existence without conflicting emotions. A thinker as a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice, he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again his being expressed in words, the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical. This symbolism is the one essential, the vessel and the expression of human history The learned philosophical works that arise our of it ate superfluous and only serve to swell the bulk of a professional literature.
I can then call the essence of what I have discovered “true” — that is, true for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time, not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible. But what I wrote in the storm and stress of those years was, it must be admitted, a very imperfect statement of what stood clearly before me, and it renamed to devote the years that followed to the task of correlating facts and finding means of expression which should enable me to present my idea in the most forcible form.
To perfect that form would be impossible — life itself is only fulfilled in death. But I have once more made the attempt to bring up even the earliest
