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482 number, is also asserted in "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense" (Werke, X, 201-2).

undefined The feeling comes to expression repeatedly in The Birth of Tragedy; also in "Schopenhauer as Educator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth."

undefined This view makes the background of The Birth of Tragedy (see particularly sects. 4 and 5). Cf. also Werke, IX, 192-4; XII, 169, § 349; and the "Attempt at Self-criticism," prefixed to the later edition of The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche appears to think that the World-Will projects space and time with the picture, so that these forms are not, strictly speaking, merely our own (cf. an express remark, Werke, IX, 107, § 64). As stated in the quotation made in the text, we may divine our real nature as projections of the World-Will, figures in his dream, but it is no more necessary that we should do so, than that the painted warriors on a canvas should be conscious of the battle in which they there take part (Birth of Tragedy, end of sect. 5). It appears that Nietzsche had speculative moods even as a boy. "At the age of twelve, I thought out for myself a wonderful Trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My reasoning was that God, thinking of himself, created the second person of the God-head; but that, in order to be able to think of himself, he had to think of his antithesis, and so create him.—In this way, I began philosophizing" (Werke, XIV, 347, § 201).

undefined Since though the world is a picture, not a reality, and has only an illusory being (Schein), like figures in a dream, it springs from the deepest need of its Creator as a suffering being, Nietzsche finds the will to illusion deeper, "more metaphysical," than the will to truth; it is, indeed, just the truth or reality (i.e., itself) that the World-Will wants to get away from (and does get away from in turning itself into a picture to contemplate). And it is the same desire for an illusory picture-world that gives birth, he holds, to art in man (see the "Preface to Richard Wagner" prefixed to The Birth of Tragedy, where art is called the "true metaphysical activity of life". The will to truth comes thus to be in a way anti-natural: "to will to know, when it is just illusion that is the redemptive thing (die Erlösung)—what an inversion"! See Werke, XIV, 366, § 236; 369, § 240 (these being later comments on The Birth of Tragedy). Not only is it naive to think that we can get out of the world of illusion, but, if it were possible, the escape would be undesirable: life in illusion is the goal. Nietzsche accordingly calls his philosophy an inverted Platonism—the further we get from real being, the better, fairer, purer (Werke, IX, 109, § 168; X, 160, § 126; IX, 190, § 133).

undefined Cf. the striking language of C. J. Keyser, "Not in the ground of need, not in bent and painful toil, but in the deep-centered play-instinct of the world, in the joyous mood of the eternal Being, which is always young, science has her origin and root" ("Mathematics," a pamphlet). The peculiarity of Nietzsche's view is that he assigns a motive to the play, viz., dissatisfaction and pain. The idea of the world as a dream or play or game, and of ourselves as figures or players in it (cf. Werke, XIII, 207, § 471; 282, § 685) appears also in J. H. Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. IV, p. 221. Newman, however, distinguished "our real eternal existence" from this temporal form, while to Nietzsche, as to Schopenhauer, "real eternal existence" belongs to the "World-Will" alone.

undefined I confess that I can make no sense out of such a view. The thought of pain is of course different from pain itself (as different as any thought is from an experience), but that pain may be in itself something different from what we feel is to me a proposition without meaning—pain is feeling and nothing else (which is not saying that it may not have physiological or other conditions, which are not pain). Cf. William James, "No one pretends that pain as such only appears like pain, but