Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/127

Rh of reality, he is as hopelessly shut in to subjectivism as Kant was. Our own actions are essentially unknown, as truly as outer objects are. "In Prison"," he says, "There is absolutely no escaping, no way of slipping or stealing into the actual world. We are in our web, we spiders, and whatever we catch in it, we can catch nothing but what allows itself to be caught in our kind of web." In another place he speaks of the mind as a mirror: "if we attempt to consider the mirror in itself, we discover nothing but the things in it; if we try to lay hold of the things, we come finally to nothing beyond the mirror." "Why does not man see things as they are? He stands in the way of them; he covers the things." Once he even raises the question whether there are any things independent of us, —he only raises it, however, for his practically constant underlying belief is that independent realities exist, however unknown. His attitude is strikingly (I might say, unconsciously) exhibited in a comparison of the world of our experience to a dream, in the midst of which the dreamer becomes sufficiently awake to know that it is a dream, and yet feels that he must go on dreaming, as otherwise, like a sleep-walker who must dream on if he is not precipitously to fall, he might perish. The dream (appearance, Schein) is spoken of indeed as the active, living thing—a world of independent reality is practically ignored. And yet the very fact that he speaks of a dream, and of becoming half-awake in it, shows that the idea of independent reality shimmers in the background of his mind, since a dream that is not contrasted with a waking state is not a dream at all.

Practically then in this second period Nietzsche is shut up in the phenomenalist position, but with reservations or implications which keep us from calling him a phenomenalist. He says on the one hand: we have no knowledge of reality—every metaphysical thought is far from the truth; even in religion,