Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/63

Rh and suffering are that which urge it on. Schopenhauer once tells of the way in which as a youth he had sought now and then to look at himself and his doings as things apart from him, to make a picture of them—he supposes with the idea of finding them more enjoyable; perhaps the experience has not been his alone. Well, Nietzsche dares suggest that the World-Will is in an essentially similar situation, that it too is led to make a picture, an object of itself, to thus project itself in the form of a vision or dream—and that it is this vision or dream which we and the world are. We and the world are the Eternal One, only not as he exists in himself, but as spread out in space and time for his contemplation—for all objectification requires these forms, at least the form of space, as a condition. "In the dream of the God, we are figures who divine what he dreams." And yet because the vision is a result, is ever being projected and never is, a certain inconstancy and change belong to the world's essential nature—it and all its parts are ever arising, ever passing away, ever freshly arising; there is birth, death, rebirth in it without end. undefined

A fanciful metaphysics, we say, and Nietzsche himself thought so later—and yet, perhaps, not much more fanciful than some other species of the genus. It has points of contact with Fichte's—the World-Will might be called an Absolute Ego who creates all things out of himself; and yet it is essentially different from Fichte's, or any moral metaphysics, and for something at all like it we may have to go back as far as Heraclitus. It might be described as an æsthetic metaphysics (Nietzsche spoke of it afterward as an Artisten-Metaphysik). The world is there because of an æsthetic need of its creator; and the way in which we in turn must justify it (if we justify it at all) is by conceiving of it æsthetically, converting it into a picture ourselves, repeating thus in principle the act of its creator, experiencing anew his pain and his creative joy. undefined For we cannot give a rational justification to the world—it did not originate in reason and shows no rational