=Appreciation of Simple Truths.=--It is the characteristic o_Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN

A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS

BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER HARVEY

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

1908

By Charles H. Kerr & Company

CONTENTS

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

OF THE FIRST AND LAST THINGS

HISTORY OF THE MORAL FEELINGS

THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

PREFACE.

It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that

there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, from

the "Birth of Tragedy" to the recently published "Prelude to a

Philosophy of the Future": they all contain, I have been told, snares

and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a

constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and

of approved customs. What!? Everything is merely--human--all too human?

With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a

certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition

to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply

misrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, still

more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. And

in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world

with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timely

advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and

challenger of God; and whosoever has experienced any of the consequences

of such deep distrust, anything of the chills and the agonies of

isolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemns

him endowed with it, will also understand how often I must have sought

relief and self-forgetfulness from any source--through any object of

veneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness;

also why I, when I could not find what I was in need of, had to fashion

it for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet or

writer has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all the

art in the world possibly have?) That which I always stood most in need

of in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enough

not to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point of

view--a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship and

equality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free from

suspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals,

superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of

color, skin and seeming. Perhaps I could be fairly reproached with much

"art" in this regard, many fine counterfeitings; for example, that,

wisely or wilfully, I had shut my eyes to Schopenhauer's blind will

towards ethic, at a time when I was already clear sighted enough on the

subject of ethic; likewise that I had deceived myself concerning Richard

Wagner's incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an

end; likewise concerning the Greeks, likewise concerning the Germans and

their future--and there may be, perhaps, a long list of such likewises.

Granted, however, that all this were true, and with justice urged

against me, what does it signify, what can it signify in regard to how

much of the self-sustaining capacity, how much of reason and higher

protection are embraced in such self-deception?--and how much more

falsity is still necessary to me that I may therewith always reassure

myself regarding the luxury of my truth. Enough, I still live; and life

is not considered now apart from ethic; it _will_ [have] deception; it

thrives (lebt) on deception ... but am I not beginning to do all over

again what I have always done, I, the old immoralist, and bird

snarer--talk unmorally, ultramorally, "beyond good and evil"?

Thus, then, have I evolved for myself the "free spirits" to whom this

discouraging-encouraging work, under the general title "Human, All Too

Human," is dedicated. Such "free spirits" do not really exist and never

did exist. But I stood in need of them, as I have pointed out, in order

that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness,

strangeness, _acedia_, incapacity): to serve as gay spirits and

comrades, with whom one may talk and laugh when one is disposed to talk

and laugh, and whom one may send to the devil when they grow wearisome.

They are some compensation for the lack of friends. That such free

spirits can possibly exist, that our Europe will yet number among her

sons of to-morrow or of the day after to-morrow, such a brilliant and

enthusiastic company, alive and palpable and not merely, as in my case,

fantasms and imaginary shades, I, myself, can by no means doubt. I see

them already coming, slowly, slowly. May it not be that I am doing a

little something to expedite their coming when I describe in advance the

influences under which I see them evolving and the ways along which they

travel?

It may be conjectured that a soul in which the type of "free spirit" can

attain maturity and completeness had its decisive and deciding event in

the form of a great emancipation or unbinding, and that prior to that

event it seemed only the more firmly and forever chained to its place

and pillar. What binds strongest? What cords seem almost unbreakable? In

the case of mortals of a choice and lofty nature they will be those of

duty: that reverence, which in youth is most typical, that timidity and

tenderness in the presence of the traditionally honored and the worthy,

that gratitude to the soil from which we sprung, for the hand that

guided us, for the relic before which we were taught to pray--their

sublimest moments will themselves bind these souls most strongly. The

great liberation comes suddenly to such prisoners, like an earthquake:

the young soul is all at once shaken, torn apart, cast forth--it

comprehends not itself what is taking place. An involuntary onward

impulse rules them with the mastery of command; a will, a wish are

developed to go forward, anywhere, at any price; a strong, dangerous

curiosity regarding an undiscovered world flames and flashes in all

their being. "Better to die than live _here_"--so sounds the tempting

voice: and this "here," this "at home" constitutes all they have

hitherto loved. A sudden dread and distrust of that which they loved, a

flash of contempt for that which is called their "duty," a mutinous,

wilful, volcanic-like longing for a far away journey, strange scenes and

people, annihilation, petrifaction, a hatred surmounting love, perhaps a

sacrilegious impulse and look backwards, to where they so long prayed

and loved, perhaps a flush of shame for what they did and at the same

time an exultation at having done it, an inner, intoxicating,

delightful tremor in which is betrayed the sense of victory--a victory?

over what? over whom? a riddle-like victory, fruitful in questioning and

well worth questioning, but the _first_ victory, for all--such things of

pain and ill belong to the history of the great liberation. And it is at

the same time a malady that can destroy a man, this first outbreak of

strength and will for self-destination, self-valuation, this will for

free will: and how much illness is forced to the surface in the frantic

strivings and singularities with which the freedman, the liberated seeks

henceforth to attest his mastery over things! He roves fiercely around,

with an unsatisfied longing and whatever objects he may encounter must

suffer from the perilous expectancy of his pride; he tears to pieces

whatever attracts him. With a sardonic laugh he overturns whatever he

finds veiled or protected by any reverential awe: he would see what

these things look like when they are overturned. It is wilfulness and

delight in the wilfulness of it, if he now, perhaps, gives his approval

to that which has heretofore been in ill repute--if, in curiosity and

experiment, he penetrates stealthily to the most forbidden things. In

the background during all his plunging and roaming--for he is as

restless and aimless in his course as if lost in a wilderness--is the

interrogation mark of a curiosity growing ever more dangerous. "Can we

not upset every standard? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an

invention and a subtlety of the devil? Is everything, in the last

resort, false? And if we are dupes are we not on that very account

dupers also? _must_ we not be dupers also?" Such reflections lead and

mislead him, ever further on, ever further away. Solitude, that dread

goddess and mater saeva cupidinum, encircles and besets him, ever more

threatening, more violent, more heart breaking--but who to-day knows

what solitude is?

From this morbid solitude, from the deserts of such trial years, the way

is yet far to that great, overflowing certainty and healthiness which

cannot dispense even with sickness as a means and a grappling hook of

knowledge; to that matured freedom of the spirit which is, in an equal

degree, self mastery and discipline of the heart, and gives access to

the path of much and various reflection--to that inner comprehensiveness

and self satisfaction of over-richness which precludes all danger that

the spirit has gone astray even in its own path and is sitting

intoxicated in some corner or other; to that overplus of plastic,

healing, imitative and restorative power which is the very sign of

vigorous health, that overplus which confers upon the free spirit the

perilous prerogative of spending a life in experiment and of running

adventurous risks: the past-master-privilege of the free spirit. In the

interval there may be long years of convalescence, years filled with

many hued painfully-bewitching transformations, dominated and led to the

goal by a tenacious will for health that is often emboldened to assume

the guise and the disguise of health. There is a middle ground to this,

which a man of such destiny can not subsequently recall without emotion;

he basks in a special fine sun of his own, with a feeling of birdlike

freedom, birdlike visual power, birdlike irrepressibleness, a something

extraneous (Drittes) in which curiosity and delicate disdain have

united. A "free spirit"--this refreshing term is grateful in any mood,

it almost sets one aglow. One lives--no longer in the bonds of love and

hate, without a yes or no, here or there indifferently, best pleased to

evade, to avoid, to beat about, neither advancing nor retreating. One is

habituated to the bad, like a person who all at once sees a fearful

hurly-burly _beneath_ him--and one was the counterpart of him who

bothers himself with things that do not concern him. As a matter of fact

the free spirit is bothered with mere things--and how many

things--which no longer _concern_ him.

A step further in recovery: and the free spirit draws near to life

again, slowly indeed, almost refractorily, almost distrustfully. There

is again warmth and mellowness: feeling and fellow feeling acquire

depth, lambent airs stir all about him. He almost feels: it seems as if

now for the first time his eyes are open to things _near_. He is in

amaze and sits hushed: for where had he been? These near and immediate

things: how changed they seem to him! He looks gratefully back--grateful

for his wandering, his self exile and severity, his lookings afar and

his bird flights in the cold heights. How fortunate that he has not,

like a sensitive, dull home body, remained always "in the house" and "at

home!" He had been beside himself, beyond a doubt. Now for the first

time he really sees himself--and what surprises in the process. What

hitherto unfelt tremors! Yet what joy in the exhaustion, the old

sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How it delights him,

suffering, to sit still, to exercise patience, to lie in the sun! Who so

well as he appreciates the fact that there comes balmy weather even in

winter, who delights more in the sunshine athwart the wall? They are

the most appreciative creatures in the world, and also the most humble,

these convalescents and lizards, crawling back towards life: there are

some among them who can let no day slip past them without addressing

some song of praise to its retreating light. And speaking seriously, it

is a fundamental cure for all pessimism (the cankerous vice, as is well

known, of all idealists and humbugs), to become ill in the manner of

these free spirits, to remain ill quite a while and then bit by bit grow

healthy--I mean healthier. It is wisdom, worldly wisdom, to administer

even health to oneself for a long time in small doses.

About this time it becomes at last possible, amid the flash lights of a

still unestablished, still precarious health, for the free, the ever

freer spirit to begin to read the riddle of that great liberation, a

riddle which has hitherto lingered, obscure, well worth questioning,

almost impalpable, in his memory. If once he hardly dared to ask "why so

apart? so alone? renouncing all I loved? renouncing respect itself? why

this coldness, this suspicion, this hate for one's very virtues?"--now

he dares, and asks it loudly, already hearing the answer, "you had to

become master over yourself, master of your own good qualities. Formerly

they were your masters: but they should be merely your tools along with

other tools. You had to acquire power over your aye and no and learn to

hold and withhold them in accordance with your higher aims. You had to

grasp the perspective of every representation (Werthschaetzung)--the

dislocation, distortion and the apparent end or teleology of the

horizon, besides whatever else appertains to the perspective: also the

element of demerit in its relation to opposing merit, and the whole

intellectual cost of every affirmative, every negative. You had to find

out the _inevitable_ error[1] in every Yes and in every No, error as

inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the perspective and

its inaccuracy.[1] Above all, you had to see with your own eyes where

the error[1] is always greatest: there, namely, where life is littlest,

narrowest, meanest, least developed and yet cannot help looking upon

itself as the goal and standard of things, and smugly and ignobly and

incessantly tearing to tatters all that is highest and greatest and

richest, and putting the shreds into the form of questions from the

standpoint of its own well being. You had to see with your own eyes the

problem of classification, (Rangordnung, regulation concerning rank and

station) and how strength and sweep and reach of perspective wax upward

together: You had"--enough, the free spirit knows henceforward which

"you had" it has obeyed and also what it now can do and what it now, for

the first time, _dare_.

[1] Ungerechtigkeit, literally wrongfulness, injustice, unrighteousness.

Accordingly, the free spirit works out for itself an answer to that

riddle of its liberation and concludes by generalizing upon its

experience in the following fashion: "What I went through everyone must

go through" in whom any problem is germinated and strives to body itself

forth. The inner power and inevitability of this problem will assert

themselves in due course, as in the case of any unsuspected

pregnancy--long before the spirit has seen this problem in its true

aspect and learned to call it by its right name. Our destiny exercises

its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature:

it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day. Granted, that it

is the problem of classification[2] of which we free spirits may say,

this is _our_ problem, yet it is only now, in the midday of our life,

that we fully appreciate what preparations, shifts, trials, ordeals,

stages, were essential to that problem before it could emerge to our

view, and why we had to go through the various and contradictory

longings and satisfactions of body and soul, as circumnavigators and

adventurers of that inner world called "man"; as surveyors of that

"higher" and of that "progression"[3] that is also called

"man"--crowding in everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing,

missing nothing, testing everything, sifting everything and eliminating

the chance impurities--until at last we could say, we free spirits:

"Here--a _new_ problem! Here, a long ladder on the rungs of which we

ourselves have rested and risen, which we have actually been at times.

Here is a something higher, a something deeper, a something below us, a

vastly extensive order, (Ordnung) a comparative classification

(Rangordnung), that we perceive: here--_our_ problem!"

[2] Rangordnung: the meaning is "the problem of grasping the relative

importance of things."

[3] Uebereinander: one over another.

To what stage in the development just outlined the present book belongs

(or is assigned) is something that will be hidden from no augur or

psychologist for an instant. But where are there psychologists to-day?

In France, certainly; in Russia, perhaps; certainly not in Germany.

Grounds are not wanting, to be sure, upon which the Germans of to-day

may adduce this fact to their credit: unhappily for one who in this

matter is fashioned and mentored in an un-German school! This _German_

book, which has found its readers in a wide circle of lands and

peoples--it has been some ten years on its rounds--and which must make

its way by means of any musical art and tune that will captivate the

foreign ear as well as the native--this book has been read most

indifferently in Germany itself and little heeded there: to what is that

due? "It requires too much," I have been told, "it addresses itself to

men free from the press of petty obligations, it demands fine and

trained perceptions, it requires a surplus, a surplus of time, of the

lightness of heaven and of the heart, of otium in the most unrestricted

sense: mere good things that we Germans of to-day have not got and

therefore cannot give." After so graceful a retort, my philosophy bids

me be silent and ask no more questions: at times, as the proverb says,

one remains a philosopher only because one says--nothing!

Nice, Spring, 1886.

OF THE FIRST AND LAST THINGS.

=Chemistry of the Notions and the Feelings.=--Philosophical problems, in

almost all their aspects, present themselves in the same interrogative

formula now that they did two thousand years ago: how can a thing

develop out of its antithesis? for example, the reasonable from the

non-reasonable, the animate from the inanimate, the logical from the

illogical, altruism from egoism, disinterestedness from greed, truth

from error? The metaphysical philosophy formerly steered itself clear of

this difficulty to such extent as to repudiate the evolution of one

thing from another and to assign a miraculous origin to what it deemed

highest and best, due to the very nature and being of the

"thing-in-itself." The historical philosophy, on the other hand, which

can no longer be viewed apart from physical science, the youngest of all

philosophical methods, discovered experimentally (and its results will

probably always be the same) that there is no antithesis whatever,

except in the usual exaggerations of popular or metaphysical

comprehension, and that an error of the reason is at the bottom of such

contradiction. According to its explanation, there is, strictly

speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of

view. Both are simply sublimations in which the basic element seems

almost evaporated and betrays its presence only to the keenest

observation. All that we need and that could possibly be given us in the

present state of development of the sciences, is a chemistry of the

moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling, as well as of those

emotions which we experience in the affairs, great and small, of society

and civilization, and which we are sensible of even in solitude. But

what if this chemistry established the fact that, even in _its_ domain,

the most magnificent results were attained with the basest and most

despised ingredients? Would many feel disposed to continue such

investigations? Mankind loves to put by the questions of its origin and

beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the

opposite course?

=The Traditional Error of Philosophers.=--All philosophers make the

common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of

trying, through an analysis of him, to reach a conclusion. "Man"

involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a

passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet

everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the

last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man

during a very limited period of time. Lack of the historical sense is

the traditional defect in all philosophers. Many innocently take man in

his most childish state as fashioned through the influence of certain

religious and even of certain political developments, as the permanent

form under which man must be viewed. They will not learn that man has

evolved,[4] that the intellectual faculty itself is an evolution,

whereas some philosophers make the whole cosmos out of this intellectual

faculty. But everything essential in human evolution took place aeons

ago, long before the four thousand years or so of which we know

anything: during these man may not have changed very much. However, the

philosopher ascribes "instinct" to contemporary man and assumes that

this is one of the unalterable facts regarding man himself, and hence

affords a clue to the understanding of the universe in general. The

whole teleology is so planned that man during the last four thousand

years shall be spoken of as a being existing from all eternity, and

with reference to whom everything in the cosmos from its very inception

is naturally ordered. Yet everything evolved: there are no eternal facts

as there are no absolute truths. Accordingly, historical philosophising

is henceforth indispensable, and with it honesty of judgment.

[4] geworden.

=Appreciation of Simple Truths.=--It is the characteristic of an

advanced civilization to set a higher value upon little, simple truths,

ascertained by scientific method, than upon the pleasing and magnificent

errors originating in metaphysical and aesthetical epochs and peoples. To

begin with, the former are spoken of with contempt as if there could be

no question of comparison respecting them, so rigid, homely, prosaic and

even discouraging is the aspect of the first, while so beautiful,

decorative, intoxicating and perhaps beatific appear the last named.

Nevertheless, the hardwon, the certain, the lasting and, therefore, the

fertile in new knowledge, is the higher; to hold fast to it is manly and

evinces courage, directness, endurance. And not only individual men but

all mankind will by degrees be uplifted to this manliness when they are

finally habituated to the proper appreciation of tenable, enduring

knowledge and have lost all faith in inspiration and in the miraculous

revelation of truth. The reverers of forms, indeed, with their standards

of beauty and taste, may have good reason to laugh when the appreciation

of little truths and the scientific spirit begin to prevail, but that

will be only because their eyes are not yet opened to the charm of the

utmost simplicity of form or because men though reared in the rightly

appreciative spirit, will still not be fully permeated by it, so that

they continue unwittingly imitating ancient forms (and that ill enough,

as anybody does who no longer feels any interest in a thing). Formerly

the mind was not brought into play through the medium of exact thought.

Its serious business lay in the working out of forms and symbols. That

has now changed. Any seriousness in symbolism is at present the

indication of a deficient education. As our very acts become more

intellectual, our tendencies more rational, and our judgment, for

example, as to what seems reasonable, is very different from what it was

a hundred years ago: so the forms of our lives grow ever more

intellectual and, to the old fashioned eye, perhaps, uglier, but only

because it cannot see that the richness of inner, rational beauty always

spreads and deepens, and that the inner, rational aspect of all things

should now be of more consequence to us than the most beautiful

externality and the most exquisite limning.

=Astrology and the Like.=--It is presumable that the objects of the

religious, moral, aesthetic and logical notions pertain simply to the

superficialities of things, although man flatters himself with the

thought that here at least he is getting to the heart of the cosmos. He

deceives himself because these things have power to make him so happy

and so wretched, and so he evinces, in this respect, the same conceit

that characterises astrology. Astrology presupposes that the heavenly

bodies are regulated in their movements in harmony with the destiny of

mortals: the moral man presupposes that that which concerns himself most

nearly must also be the heart and soul of things.

=Misconception of Dreams.=--In the dream, mankind, in epochs of crude

primitive civilization, thought they were introduced to a second,

substantial world: here we have the source of all metaphysic. Without

the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the

world. Even the distinction between soul and body is wholly due to the

primitive conception of the dream, as also the hypothesis of the

embodied soul, whence the development of all superstition, and also,

probably, the belief in god. "The dead still live: for they appear to

the living in dreams." So reasoned mankind at one time, and through many

thousands of years.

=The Scientific Spirit Prevails only Partially, not Wholly.=--The

specialized, minutest departments of science are dealt with purely

objectively. But the general universal sciences, considered as a great,

basic unity, posit the question--truly a very living question--: to what

purpose? what is the use? Because of this reference to utility they are,

as a whole, less impersonal than when looked at in their specialized

aspects. Now in the case of philosophy, as forming the apex of the

scientific pyramid, this question of the utility of knowledge is

necessarily brought very conspicuously forward, so that every philosophy

has, unconsciously, the air of ascribing the highest utility to itself.

It is for this reason that all philosophies contain such a great amount

of high flying metaphysic, and such a shrinking from the seeming

insignificance of the deliverances of physical science: for the

significance of knowledge in relation to life must be made to appear as

great as possible. This constitutes the antagonism between the

specialties of science and philosophy. The latter aims, as art aims, at

imparting to life and conduct the utmost depth and significance: in the

former mere knowledge is sought and nothing else--whatever else be

incidentally obtained. Heretofore there has never been a philosophical

system in which philosophy itself was not made the apologist of

knowledge [in the abstract]. On this point, at least, each is optimistic

and insists that to knowledge the highest utility must be ascribed. They

are all under the tyranny of logic, which is, from its very nature,

optimism.

=The Discordant Element in Science.=--Philosophy severed itself from

science when it put the question: what is that knowledge of the world

and of life through which mankind may be made happiest? This happened

when the Socratic school arose: with the standpoint of _happiness_ the

arteries of investigating science were compressed too tightly to permit

of any circulation of the blood--and are so compressed to-day.

=Pneumatic Explanation of Nature.=[5]--Metaphysic reads the message of

nature as if it were written purely pneumatically, as the church and its

learned ones formerly did where the bible was concerned. It requires a

great deal of expertness to apply to nature the same strict science of

interpretation that the philologists have devised for all literature,

and to apply it for the purpose of a simple, direct interpretation of

the message, and at the same time, not bring out a double meaning. But,

as in the case of books and literature, errors of exposition are far

from being completely eliminated, and vestiges of allegorical and

mystical interpretations are still to be met with in the most cultivated

circles, so where nature is concerned the case is--actually much worse.

[5] Pneumatic is here used in the sense of spiritual. Pneuma being the

Greek word in the New Testament for the Holy Spirit.--Ed.

=Metaphysical World.=--It is true, there may be a metaphysical world;

the absolute possibility of it can scarcely be disputed. We see all

things through the medium of the human head and we cannot well cut off

this head: although there remains the question what part of the world

would be left after it had been cut off. But that is a purely abstract

scientific problem and one not much calculated to give men uneasiness:

yet everything that has heretofore made metaphysical assumptions

valuable, fearful or delightful to men, all that gave rise to them is

passion, error and self deception: the worst systems of knowledge, not

the best, pin their tenets of belief thereto. When such methods are once

brought to view as the basis of all existing religions and metaphysics,

they are already discredited. There always remains, however, the

possibility already conceded: but nothing at all can be made out of

that, to say not a word about letting happiness, salvation and life hang

upon the threads spun from such a possibility. Accordingly, nothing

could be predicated of the metaphysical world beyond the fact that it is

an elsewhere,[6] another sphere, inaccessible and incomprehensible to

us: it would become a thing of negative properties. Even were the

existence of such a world absolutely established, it would nevertheless

remain incontrovertible that of all kinds of knowledge, knowledge of

such a world would be of least consequence--of even less consequence

than knowledge of the chemical analysis of water would be to a storm

tossed mariner.

[6] Anderssein.

=The Harmlessness of Metaphysic in the Future.=--As soon as religion,

art and ethics are so understood that a full comprehension of them can

be gained without taking refuge in the postulates of metaphysical

claptrap at any point in the line of reasoning, there will be a complete

cessation of interest in the purely theoretical problem of the "thing in

itself" and the "phenomenon." For here, too, the same truth applies: in

religion, art and ethics we are not concerned with the "essence of the

cosmos".[7] We are in the sphere of pure conception. No presentiment [or

intuition] can carry us any further. With perfect tranquility the

question of how our conception of the world could differ so sharply from

the actual world as it is manifest to us, will be relegated to the

physiological sciences and to the history of the evolution of ideas and

organisms.

[7] "Wesen der Welt an sich."

=Language as a Presumptive Science.=--The importance of language in the

development of civilization consists in the fact that by means of it

man placed one world, his own, alongside another, a place of leverage

that he thought so firm as to admit of his turning the rest of the

cosmos on a pivot that he might master it. In so far as man for ages

looked upon mere ideas and names of things as upon aeternae veritates,

he evinced the very pride with which he raised himself above the brute.

He really supposed that in language he possessed a knowledge of the

cosmos. The language builder was not so modest as to believe that he was

only giving names to things. On the contrary he thought he embodied the

highest wisdom concerning things in [mere] words; and, in truth,

language is the first movement in all strivings for wisdom. Here, too,

it is _faith in ascertained truth_[8] from which the mightiest fountains

of strength have flowed. Very tardily--only now--it dawns upon men that

they have propagated a monstrous error in their belief in language.

Fortunately, it is too late now to arrest and turn back the evolutionary

process of the reason, which had its inception in this belief. Logic

itself rests upon assumptions to which nothing in the world of reality

corresponds. For example, the correspondence of certain things to one

another and the identity of those things at different periods of time

are assumptions pure and simple, but the science of logic originated in

the positive belief that they were not assumptions at all but

established facts. It is the same with the science of mathematics which

certainly would never have come into existence if mankind had known from

the beginning that in all nature there is no perfectly straight line, no

true circle, no standard of measurement.

[8] Glaube an die gefundene Wahrheit, as distinguished from faith in

what is taken on trust as truth.

=Dream and Civilization.=--The function of the brain which is most

encroached upon in slumber is the memory; not that it is wholly

suspended, but it is reduced to a state of imperfection as, in primitive

ages of mankind, was probably the case with everyone, whether waking or

sleeping. Uncontrolled and entangled as it is, it perpetually confuses

things as a result of the most trifling similarities, yet in the same

mental confusion and lack of control the nations invented their

mythologies, while nowadays travelers habitually observe how prone the

savage is to forgetfulness, how his mind, after the least exertion of

memory, begins to wander and lose itself until finally he utters

falsehood and nonsense from sheer exhaustion. Yet, in dreams, we all

resemble this savage. Inadequacy of distinction and error of comparison

are the basis of the preposterous things we do and say in dreams, so

that when we clearly recall a dream we are startled that so much idiocy

lurks within us. The absolute distinctness of all dream-images, due to

implicit faith in their substantial reality, recalls the conditions in

which earlier mankind were placed, for whom hallucinations had

extraordinary vividness, entire communities and even entire nations

laboring simultaneously under them. Therefore: in sleep and in dream we

make the pilgrimage of early mankind over again.

=Logic of the Dream.=--During sleep the nervous system, through various

inner provocatives, is in constant agitation. Almost all the organs act

independently and vigorously. The blood circulates rapidly. The posture

of the sleeper compresses some portions of the body. The coverlets

influence the sensations in different ways. The stomach carries on the

digestive process and acts upon other organs thereby. The intestines are

in motion. The position of the head induces unaccustomed action. The

feet, shoeless, no longer pressing the ground, are the occasion of other

sensations of novelty, as is, indeed, the changed garb of the entire

body. All these things, following the bustle and change of the day,

result, through their novelty, in a movement throughout the entire

system that extends even to the brain functions. Thus there are a

hundred circumstances to induce perplexity in the mind, a questioning as

to the cause of this excitation. Now, the dream is a _seeking and

presenting of reasons_ for these excitations of feeling, of the supposed

reasons, that is to say. Thus, for example, whoever has his feet bound

with two threads will probably dream that a pair of serpents are coiled

about his feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief with an

accompanying imaginative picture and the argument: "these snakes must be

the _causa_ of those sensations which I, the sleeper, now have." So

reasons the mind of the sleeper. The conditions precedent, as thus

conjectured, become, owing to the excitation of the fancy, present

realities. Everyone knows from experience how a dreamer will transform

one piercing sound, for example, that of a bell, into another of quite a

different nature, say, the report of cannon. In his dream he becomes

aware first of the effects, which he explains by a subsequent hypothesis

and becomes persuaded of the purely conjectural nature of the sound. But

how comes it that the mind of the dreamer goes so far astray when the

same mind, awake, is habitually cautious, careful, and so conservative

in its dealings with hypotheses? why does the first plausible

hypothesis of the cause of a sensation gain credit in the dreaming

state? (For in a dream we look upon that dream as reality, that is, we

accept our hypotheses as fully established). I have no doubt that as men

argue in their dreams to-day, mankind argued, even in their waking

moments, for thousands of years: the first _causa_, that occurred to the

mind with reference to anything that stood in need of explanation, was

accepted as the true explanation and served as such. (Savages show the

same tendency in operation, as the reports of travelers agree). In the

dream this atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within

us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty

developed itself and still develops itself in every individual. Dreams

carry us back to the earlier stages of human culture and afford us a

means of understanding it more clearly. Dream thought comes so easily to

us now because we are so thoroughly trained to it through the

interminable stages of evolution during which this fanciful and facile

form of theorising has prevailed. To a certain extent the dream is a

restorative for the brain, which, during the day, is called upon to meet

the many demands for trained thought made upon it by the conditions of a

higher civilization.--We may, if we please, become sensible, even in our

waking moments, of a condition that is as a door and vestibule to

dreaming. If we close our eyes the brain immediately conjures up a

medley of impressions of light and color, apparently a sort of imitation

and echo of the impressions forced in upon the brain during its waking

moments. And now the mind, in co-operation with the imagination,

transforms this formless play of light and color into definite figures,

moving groups, landscapes. What really takes place is a sort of

reasoning from effect back to cause. As the brain inquires: whence these

impressions of light and color? it posits as the inducing causes of such

lights and colors, those shapes and figures. They serve the brain as the

occasions of those lights and colors because the brain, when the eyes

are open and the senses awake, is accustomed to perceiving the cause of

every impression of light and color made upon it. Here again the

imagination is continually interposing its images inasmuch as it

participates in the production of the impressions made through the

senses day by day: and the dream-fancy does exactly the same thing--that

is, the presumed cause is determined from the effect and _after_ the

effect: all this, too, with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this

matter, as in a matter of jugglery or sleight-of-hand, a confusion of

the mind is produced and an after effect is made to appear a

simultaneous action, an inverted succession of events, even.--From

these considerations we can see how _late_ strict, logical thought, the

true notion of cause and effect must have been in developing, since our

intellectual and rational faculties to this very day revert to these

primitive processes of deduction, while practically half our lifetime is

spent in the super-inducing conditions.--Even the poet, the artist,

ascribes to his sentimental and emotional states causes which are not

the true ones. To that extent he is a reminder of early mankind and can

aid us in its comprehension.

=Association.=[9]--All strong feelings are associated with a variety of

allied sentiments and emotions. They stir up the memory at the same

time. When we are under their influence we are reminded of similar

states and we feel a renewal of them within us. Thus are formed habitual

successions of feelings and notions, which, at last, when they follow

one another with lightning rapidity are no longer felt as complexities

but as unities. In this sense we hear of moral feelings, of religious

feelings, as if they were absolute unities. In reality they are streams

with a hundred sources and tributaries. Here again, the unity of the

word speaks nothing for the unity of the thing.

[9] Miterklingen: to sound simultaneously with.

=No Within and Without in the World.=[10]--As Democritus transferred the

notions above and below to limitless space, where they are destitute of

meaning, so the philosophers do generally with the idea "within and

without," as regards the form and substance (Wesen und Erscheinung) of

the world. What they claim is that through the medium of profound

feelings one can penetrate deep into the soul of things (Innre), draw

close to the heart of nature. But these feelings are deep only in so far

as with them are simultaneously aroused, although almost imperceptibly,

certain complicated groups of thoughts (Gedankengruppen) which we call

deep: a feeling is deep because we deem the thoughts accompanying it

deep. But deep thought can nevertheless be very widely sundered from

truth, as for instance every metaphysical thought. Take from deep

feeling the element of thought blended with it and all that remains is

_strength_ of feeling which is no voucher for the validity of

knowledge, as intense faith is evidence only of its own intensity and

not of the truth of that in which the faith is felt.

[10] Kein Innen und Aussen in der Welt: the above translation may seem

too literal but some dispute has arisen concerning the precise idea the

author means to convey.

=Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself.=--The philosophers are in the habit of

placing themselves in front of life and experience--that which they call

the world of phenomena--as if they were standing before a picture that

is unrolled before them in its final completeness. This panorama, they

think, must be studied in every detail in order to reach some conclusion

regarding the object represented by the picture. From effect,

accordingly is deduced cause and from cause is deduced the

unconditioned. This process is generally looked upon as affording the

all sufficient explanation of the world of phenomena. On the other hand

one must, (while putting the conception of the metaphysical distinctly

forward as that of the unconditioned, and consequently of the

unconditioning) absolutely deny any connection between the unconditioned

(of the metaphysical world) and the world known to us: so that

throughout phenomena there is no manifestation of the thing-in-itself,

and getting from one to the other is out of the question. Thus is left

quite ignored the circumstance that the picture--that which we now call

life and experience--is a gradual evolution, is, indeed, still in

process of evolution and for that reason should not be regarded as an

enduring whole from which any conclusion as to its author (the

all-sufficient reason) could be arrived at, or even pronounced out of

the question. It is because we have for thousands of years looked into

the world with moral, aesthetic, religious predispositions, with blind

prejudice, passion or fear, and surfeited ourselves with indulgence in

the follies of illogical thought, that the world has gradually become so

wondrously motley, frightful, significant, soulful: it has taken on

tints, but we have been the colorists: the human intellect, upon the

foundation of human needs, of human passions, has reared all these

"phenomena" and injected its own erroneous fundamental conceptions into

things. Late, very late, the human intellect checks itself: and now the

world of experience and the thing-in-itself seem to it so severed and so

antithetical that it denies the possibility of one's hinging upon the

other--or else summons us to surrender our intellect, our personal will,

to the secret and the awe-inspiring in order that thereby we may attain

certainty of certainty hereafter. Again, there are those who have

combined all the characteristic features of our world of

phenomena--that is, the conception of the world which has been formed

and inherited through a series of intellectual vagaries--and instead of

holding the intellect responsible for it all, have pronounced the very

nature of things accountable for the present very sinister aspect of the

world, and preached annihilation of existence. Through all these views

and opinions the toilsome, steady process of science (which now for the

first time begins to celebrate its greatest triumph in the genesis of

thought) will definitely work itself out, the result, being, perhaps, to

the following effect: That which we now call the world is the result of

a crowd of errors and fancies which gradually developed in the general

evolution of organic nature, have grown together and been transmitted to

us as the accumulated treasure of all the past--as the _treasure_, for

whatever is worth anything in our humanity rests upon it. From this

world of conception it is in the power of science to release us only to

a slight extent--and this is all that could be wished--inasmuch as it

cannot eradicate the influence of hereditary habits of feeling, but it

can light up by degrees the stages of the development of that world of

conception, and lift us, at least for a time, above the whole spectacle.

Perhaps we may then perceive that the thing-in-itself is a meet subject

for Homeric laughter: that it seemed so much, everything, indeed, and

is really a void--void, that is to say, of meaning.

=Metaphysical Explanation.=--Man, when he is young, prizes metaphysical

explanations, because they make him see matters of the highest import in

things he found disagreeable or contemptible: and if he is not satisfied

with himself, this feeling of dissatisfaction is soothed when he sees

the most hidden world-problem or world-pain in that which he finds so

displeasing in himself. To feel himself more unresponsible and at the

same time to find things (Dinge) more interesting--that is to him the

double benefit he owes to metaphysics. Later, indeed, he acquires

distrust of the whole metaphysical method of explaining things: he then

perceives, perhaps, that those effects could have been attained just as

well and more scientifically by another method: that physical and

historical explanations would, at least, have given that feeling of

freedom from personal responsibility just as well, while interest in

life and its problems would be stimulated, perhaps, even more.