By Frithjof Schuon, Translated from the French
Pub Date: 1982
Publisher: World Wisdom Books
Format: paper, 156pp.
ISBN: 0941532011
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Related Books: Initiation
Related Audio/Video: Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon

We did not have the intention of writing a preface for this new book, but we were told that readers unused to our thought would no doubt wish to know at the outset the underlying doctrine that unites subjects at first sight disparate. Now this doctrine they will find in this book itself; they will also find it in its most explicit form in some of our preceding works, notably in Logic and Transcendence and Esoterism as Principle and as Way. Besides, we do not think that this book is more difficult of approach than the average works of profane philosophy; on the contrary, it seems to us that our way of expressing ourselves, even if at times condensed, as it has been remarked, tends to a maximum of clarity and even of simplicity; if difficulties remain, they are in the subject and consequently in the nature of things.

Moreover, our position is well known: it is fundamentally that of metaphysics, and the latter is by definition universalist, "dogmatist" in the philosophical sense of the term, and traditionalist; universalist because free of all denominational formalism; "dogmatist" because far from all subjectivist relativism, we believe that knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation and traditionalist because the traditions are there to express, in diverse ways, but unanimously, this quintessential position --at once intellectual and spiritual-- which in the final analysis is the reason for the existence of the human spirit.