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184 force (of tension, of overcoming opposition) in muscular exertion, and the physicist proceeds to take this force apart from the consciousness and feeling that it is and all its human accompaniments and to put it into the external world—really there it is an empty word. Similarly fictitious are the purely mechanical push and pull, attraction and repulsion, imagined to exist between the atoms. Without an aim, an attraction or a repulsion is an unintelligible thing. The will toward something and to get it into our power, or against something to repel it, is something we can understand; but the physicist's "attraction" and "repulsion" are words simply. So as to necessity in the world: we put it there—we add it to the facts, for, because something acts definitely and always so acts, it does not follow that it is forced to. Equally mythological are the laws which things are supposed to obey. Sometimes scientific men give up attempts at explaining things, and content themselves with description—reducing phenomena perhaps to mathematical terms, and causality to relations of equivalence between them; but this mathematizing of things brings us no nearer objective reality, perhaps takes us further away from it—the abstract quantities and their relations being still essentially sensible things, though eviscerated and ghost-like forms of them. undefined

Although Nietzsche does not question the reality of the psychological world itself, he finds that fictitious elements are more or less introduced here. A subject, for example, in the sense of something added to the feelings and thoughts themselves, is fictitious. He criticises "I think," suggesting that "it thinks" would be a more proper expression, but adding that the "it," too, must in the end go: there is no "I" or "it" separate from the thinking—no constant unchanging reality of that sort. undefined