Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/72

56 the fact that a certain sensation or image always follows a certain stimulus, that this may hold of one generation after another, that it may be true of all mankind—it may seem conclusive proof that the image faithfully represents the object it stands for; and yet he is forced to ask whether a metaphor ceases to be a metaphor because it is indefinitely repeated, and whether, for all that men agree so widely in using it, it is the only possible metaphor in the circumstances. He considers also the argument from the omnipresence and unvarying character of the laws of nature, namely, that since everything in the world, no matter how great or how small, is fixed, certain, law-abiding, fantasy can have nothing to do with it, since if it had, the marks of its arbitrary hand would be somewhere discernible. He admits the plausibility of the argument, and yet suppose, he says, that we could experience variously, each of us having our own type of sensation, or suppose that we could perceive now as a bird does and now as a worm and now as a plant, or that where one responded to a stimulus with "red," another did with "blue" and still another with a sound, how then—where then would the uniformity and law-abidingness of nature be? undefined Would there not be a variety of worlds—and where would be the world? Is it a wonder that beings of one physiological type have one type of world, and does the present uniform common world prove more than that we human beings are of one type? Does it in the least prove that our responses to stimuli are the right responses, i.e., rightly represent the object? Indeed, what is the meaning of "right" (richtig) in such a connection?—since we have no originals with which to compare them. In going from object to subject, we pass, for all we know, from one sphere of being to another, and there is as little propriety in speaking of a right sensation or image, as of a right sound for a color—we cannot go beyond symbols, metaphors under such conditions. All sensations and images, no matter how varying or even contradictory they might be, may be right for the type that makes them, i.e., may serve its special life-needs, and none be right in any final sense. Moreover, the fixity and order of things in our world are a fixity and order in space and time, and Nietzsche holds now (after Kant and Schopenhauer) that these are not independent realities, but forms of our own minds—no wonder