ABSTRACT
This chapter shares with the reader some of the most important and exciting passages of Ludwig Klages's extensive works. In 1910, Klages published in book form a series of lectures first given between 1905 and 1910, collected under the title Principles of Characterology, and issued as a fourth edition in 1926 as The Foundations of the Doctrine of Character. Translated into English from the fifth and sixth editions in 1929, the study of character proposed by Klages in The Science of Character is, as one of its early commentators noted, 'exceedingly difficult'. In 1915 Klages published an essay in the Allgemeine Zeitung with the title 'Consciousness and Life'. If the theory of the will is one of the two core themes of Klages's philosophy, then the second is the doctrine of what Klages calls the 'reality of images'.
