but that some beings might experience time backwards, or forwards and backwards alternately, whence would result other directions of life and other conceptions of cause and effect than those with which we are familiar. It is a hopeless curiosity, indeed, to wish to see round our corner, but Nietzsche thinks or hopes that at least we are modest enough not to claim that our perspective is the only one. He even says that by reflections such as these the world becomes infinite to him again, i.e., capable of an infinite variety of interpretations,—though he has no notion of worshiping the new infinity, since it may include undivine interpretations as well as the other kind.[1] All the interpretations may be justified relatively to those who make them, and none have strictly objective warrant. But then the question arises (and this is the third point):—
III
Are there any objective things, is there any reality (in the independent sense) at all? Nietzsche may have wavered here at times—in any case his language is not always consistent. Still two things stand out with tolerable distinctness. One is, that his very language about falsehood, error, illusion, indicate that in the background of his mind lurks the idea of something or other, the knowledge of which would be truth. Indeed he explicitly says as much—as, for example, in speaking of the possibility that the "real make-up" (wahre Beschaffenheit) of things may be so harmful to life, so opposed to its presuppositions, that illusion is needed to make life possible.[2] He even uses Kantian and Schopenhauerian language at times, speaking of the "intelligible character" of the world, i.e., the world "seen from within."[3] Zarathustra is described as willing to see "the ground of all things" and the ultimate ground.[4] o The other thing is the practically constant recognition of an original mass or chaos of sensations. They are indeed our creation, but
