of the will to power and of the forms it takes.[1] Such is his analysis of human nature.
But the driving force which he finds in us, he thinks he sees traces of, though in simpler form, in the lower ranges of life. Indeed in ourselves it is something more elemental than conscious choice or than consciousness itself. It becomes conscious on occasion, but itself lies deeper, and in a more of less unconscious form Nietzsche imagines that it exists in animals and plants, and indeed wherever there is activity. y He does not attempt to demonstrate this inference—he attempts no demonstration even of the primacy of will in man, he has not unsaid his old criticism of Schopenhauer to the effect that we have no real first-hand knowledge of will:[2] it is all, whether as regards man or as regards lower beings, hypothesis, a view without pretense to certainty, speculation, as perhaps any kind of metaphysics must be.
VI
Let me give the interpretation in still further detail—beginning with the lowest forms of existence.[3] Physical motion, for example, is a subjective phenomenon—an alteration in our sensations: the reality in the case is a change in the relations of two or more centers of power—a change that is symbolically revealed to us, being translated into the sign-language of eye and touch.[4] The world of mechanics in general is sign-language [unmeaning and unexistent apart from us or beings like us] for will-quanta struggling with one another, some perhaps temporarily overcoming [which are real, quite independent of us].[5] The unintelligible "forces," "attractions," and "repulsions" which physicists speak of get concreteness and meaning, construed as kindred to impulses in ourselves; they reach out to control or they repel foreign control much as we do.[6] The same
- ↑ "Morphologie und Entwicklungslehre des Willens zur Macht" (Beyond Good and Evil, § 23).
- ↑ He rather reasserts it (Will to Power, §§ 475-8). Richter, op. cit., p. 274, comments on the difficulty presented by these varying views.
- ↑ Cf. the language of Will to Power, § 712.
- ↑ Will to Power, §§ 625, 634, 689 (motion eine Bilderrede, mechanics eine blosse Semiotik).
- ↑ Ibid., § 689.
- ↑ Ibid.. § 619.
