Page:Complete works of Nietzsche vol 10.djvu/169

 inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing equal in itself — first created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived; the beings not seeing correctly had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extra-ordinary assiduity. — The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.

112.

Cause and Effect. — We say it is "explanation"; but it is only in "description" that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better, — we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a manifold succession where the naive man and