Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/213

Rh may be said of chemical action and reaction, which are always of a specific character—the elements of preference or choice [according to the nature of the elements in question] cannot be left out of account in explaining them. "Qualities" are the expression [sensations in us] of definite kinds of action and reaction, and Nietzsche suggests that quantity may be the outcome of quality [of the objective counterpart of quality]—the center of power wishing to become more, to grow, to attain greater size. undefined Causality appears in a new light. How, we ask, can two contrasted things, such as mind or will in us and an object outside us, affect one another? Nietzsche's view makes them fundamentally alike—will acts on will everywhere, not on something foreign to it. Moreover, causality is not so much a relation of succession, as a working in an upon one another of two powers or wills, with its natural and inevitable result, either of a compromise, or of conquest on one side and subjection on the other. There is no cause and effect in the sense of an antecedent and consequent, nor is there a transference of energy from one thing to another, but rather a measuring up of forces against one another and a result—and this is why cause and effect, as ordinarily conceived, are rated a fiction, equally with "substance," "atom," and the rest. Further, the ordinary idea of causality is of an unending process of change, an effect once reached becoming the cause of another effect and so on. But why, Nietzsche asks, need this be so, why might not a state once reached continue indefinitely, why would not the impulse of self-preservation itself tend that way—why, unless aside from self-preservation there is an instinct in every living thing to be more and greater, to expand and enlarge itself, in short an instinct for power and domination?

Peculiarly interesting is the revision of biological notions that ensues. Mere self-preservations is not the life-instinct proper. The will of living creatures is a special case of will to power. It is a will, however, not only to dominate (this all