Nietzsche had been that shadow and had said to himself in bitter irony: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted.[1] r There is nothing in things that we have not put into them, science, too, being this sort of child's play.[2] We can conceive only a world That we ourselves have made—if it appears logical, it is because we have logicized it.[3] There are no facts, only interpretations; we cannot fix any fact in itself—perhaps it is absurd to wish to.[4] s We have no organ for knowing [in the strict theoretic sense, erkennen], we know ["wissen," oder glauben oder bilden uns ein] only what is useful for our human herd or species—and even as to this utility we only have a belief, cherish an imagination, and perhaps a stupid one with which we shall sometime perish.[5] Such are some of the extreme expressions of his despairing mood. And it must be admitted that along the ordinary lines of objective search and analysis Nietzsche finds no way of meeting the skepticism. Though he has the general idea of objective reality, he cannot give any content to it. Though he recognizes certain primitive data of sensation (or rather of stimulation), these are so primitive, so far away from anything like our actual world in which data and interpretation are inextricably combined, that they might almost as properly be designated by an x or an interrogation mark as the original realities themselves. What Nietzsche really now does is to view the whole problem from a new angle. And here I pass to the fourth point:—
IV
Reality as power and will to power. Some of the steps by which he reached this conception seem to be these: (1) It came over him at times that his fellow-men were different from things in general. Thoroughgoing idealism is necessarily solipsistic. If we—each of us—think that nothing exists outside our sensations and thoughts, then our fellow-beings exist only in our sensations and thoughts, i.e., have no independent being of their own; and though this might not matter greatly,
