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xx
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
seemed that such repetition might be absolutely necessary, but
have trusted the reader to carry it in his head where a failure of
his memory would not be ruinous or likely.
For the same reason,--that is, in order not to miss any indi-
cation of the drift of the thought,--I have followed the original
in the very liberal use of italics, and in the occasional eccentric
use of a punctuation mark, as I might not have done in transla-
ting a work of a different nature.
I have set my face as a flint against the temptation to add
notes that were not part of the translation. There is no telling
how much I might have enlarged the book if I had put a note at
every sentence which deserved to have its truth brought out by
fuller elucidation,--or even at every one which I thought needed
correction. It might have been within my province, if I had
been able, to explain all the allusions to contemporary events,
but I doubt whether any one could do that properly without
having access to the files of three or four well-chosen German
newspapers of Stirner's time. The allusions are clear enough,
without names and dates, to give a vivid picture of certain
aspects of German life then. The tone of some of them is ex-
plained by the fact that the book was published under
censorship.
I have usually preferred, for the sake of the connection, to
translate Biblical quotations somewhat as they stand in the Ger-
man, rather than conform them altogether to the English Bible.
I am sometimes quite as near the original Greek as if I had fol-
lowed the current translation.
Where German books are referred to, the pages cited are
those of the German editions even when (usually because of
some allusions in the text) the titles of the books are translated.
STEVEN T. BYINGTON.
THE EGO
AND
HIS OWN