A "substance" of mind goes in the same way;[1] f indeed the body comes nearer to being a substantial reality than the mind, though to neither is "substance" really applicable.[2]
In the same way "things," as any wise distinct from their attributes or activities, are not real; object taken as a "thing" is no more real than subject, matter no more real than mind.[3] A "thing" is only a certain sum of activities bound together by a concept or image. "Things," "objects," "subjects," "substance," "ego" "matter" are the metaphysics of the people, by which they seek to transcend the shifting realm of change, alone directly known to us; they want something permanent and this is the way they get it: but the entities are fictitious, imaginary.
Hence, in general, the world we commonly picture is a false one, not real: we fancy that it exists quite independently of us, that we simply find it—and we are mistaken. We may correct our images in this way and that, may make one interpretation of the world succeed another, but we do not get beyond images and interpretations: the original data in the case are a meager quantity, and even they are not reality itself (in the independent sense), but the way or ways in which reality affects us.[4] g
II
Second, we make the world real, i.e., hold it so, do so the better to live, and none the less delude ourselves. The underlying thought is that life, uncertain and changing as it is, needs something on which to stay itself; with this it walks more securely, has greater confidence.[5] We assume that what we need exists, and, by a subtle process of self-deception, transfer some of our experiences into an objective and supposably unchanging world. As Nietzsche puts it, we project our conditions of
- ↑ Will to Power, § 552; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 12.
- ↑ Cf. Zarathustra, I, iv. Nietzsche finds two elements in the notion substance," on the one hand, the idea of something permanent (see, e.g., Werke, XII, 33, § 62), on the other that of a subject (ibid., XV, 1st ed., 281) , so that if "subject" disappears as without scientific warrant, "substance" must also.
- ↑ Will to Power, §§ 551-2.
- ↑ Ibid., §§ 12 (A), 622, 542, 602, 604, 616.
- ↑ Cf. ibid., § 552d.
