world itself.[1] They look in the direction of an extreme phenomenalism—one might almost call them, in contrast with our common-sense realistic views, illusionism.
What is the relation of a sensation, say a color sensation, to the object that calls it forth? Nietzsche occupies himself much with the question. He does not doubt that there is an object, i.e., something or other which exists independently of ourselves—his question is simply, does the sensation reveal it, present it as it is? His reasoning is somewhat as follows: Mediately, we have a certain stimulation of the nerve-centers;[2] when this has taken place, somehow the sensation, color, arises. No one supposes that the color has any special resemblance to the brain-tremors that occasion it—what reason, then, is there for supposing that it resembles the still more remote inciting cause?l We give the sensation a name, i.e., we describe it to ourselves or to one another by a certain sound, but what resemblance has a sound to an actual color? The two things belong to disparate spheres—all we can say is that the sound is a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the color. But if this is so, why may not the color itself be a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the ultimate object rather than anything else—these two things also belonging to disparate sphere? m Sometimes we imagine that we come nearer objective truth, when instead of mere sensations of things we form concepts of them—we think that we thus leave aside their secondary and accidental features and reach their real essence. But what is a concept? It is something we form when, taking a number of comparatively like experience—sensible or sensational experiences in this case—we fasten our attention on their points of resemblance, leave out of account their differences, and make the resemblances stand out as a quasi-whole by themselves; this then we say they all share in alike, this is their essential idea and the essential being of each particular one. But is this being or idea anything that goes back of the experiences and explains them? Is it not itself
- ↑ Some of them appear in the fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense" (Werke, X, 189-207); statements in the text are based on this, when not credited to other sources.
- ↑ Nietzsche here uses the customary physiological datum—as to the qualifications needed from a more ultimate point of view, see note b to this chapter (at the end of the book).
