Kevin I. Slaughter

The Philosophical Writings of Edgar Saltus: The Philosophy of Disenchantment & The Anatomy of Negation

"I wrote The Philosophy of Disenchantment, which is, I think, the gloomiest and worst book ever published. Out of sheer laziness, I then produced a history of atheism, The Anatomy of Negation, which has been honored by international dislike. Need I state that of all my children it is the one that I prefer?" -Edgar Saltus "Returning to an estimate of Saltus, let us sum up by saying we have in him a temperament saturated with pessimism which expresses itself by the beautiful decoration of sinister themes. To see grandeurs in vast horrors is the last thing a commonplace person can do. Neither can commonplace persons accumulate effortlessly a legend about themselves. This Edgar Saltus has done... In The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation he has written two compact readable and scholarly resumes of pessimism and of skepticism-perhaps the best handbooks ever published on these subjects" -Broom, Vol. 2 The Philosophy of Disenchantment. "Mr. Saltus is a scientific pessimist, as witty, as bitter, as satirical, as interesting and as insolent to humanity in general as are his great teachers, Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. there is a prodigious and prodigal display of genius in his work that is a history of antitheism from Kapila to Leconte de Lisle." -Worcester Spy The Anatomy of Negation. "A whole library of pessimism compressed into one small volume by a writer whose understanding of the value of words amounts almost to genius." -Chicago Herald "The work is remarkable in every way and its originality and power will compel for it more than an ephemeral existence, for independently of the force with which it deals with its theme its literary merits are of a high order, and its reflections are those of a bold, brilliant and able thinker." -Boston Saturday Review