maintenance, and turn them into predicates of existence.[1] We convert trees and stones and stars into independent realities and feel thereby at ease and secure. And when science comes with its analysis and makes us aware that these sensible objects cannot exist just as they appear, the same feeling and craving leads us to form (or to acquiesce in the effort of science to form) the idea of elementary kinds of matter, molecules, atoms, or what not, that do not have these palpable subjective references. Indeed, practical need plays no small part in determining our beliefs in general. For example, experience gives us a whole host of particulars—how shall we get on with them? If everything is particular, and nothing like another, how can we know what to expect and how to act? Accordingly we classify the particulars or try to, make groups of them, so far as they have points of resemblance, say, this is the same as that—and reason and act accordingly. But there is no real identity in the world, and a purely theoretic instinct never would have come on such a notion: our ordinary reasoning and logic are but a rough rule of thumb.[2] h So practical need, rather than theoretical interest, determines the common ideas of causality, substance, subject, ego, being as opposed to becoming, also the ordinary articles of religious faith and conceptions like desert and guilt—they are useful to man and society, therefore we hold them valid and true.[3] Christianity, Nietzsche observes, is necessary to most in old Europe now, and a religious doctrine may be refuted a thousand times, but if necessary, man will still hold to it.[4] So valuations of things are necessary to life, and under the workings of similar impulses and by a similar self-deception we put good and bad into things, making them intrinsic there, though as matter of fact all values are of our positing and represent simply conditions of our self-preservation.[5]
In other words, a large range of belief and even of so-called "knowledge" has nothing to do with truth and never came from the search for it. i Nietzsche remarks that those who urge
