Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/730

724 than error. To put truth above error and illusion, to love truth for its own sake instead of as a means of life, is turning things upside down, is a diseased instinct. Indeed this ideal of truth for truth's sake is only another form of asceticism, it is a denial or negation of life for something else.

Besides, Nietzsche goes on to tell us, there is no universialuniversal [sic] truth anyhow, there are no eternal truths, no truths accepted by all. The propositions that have been offered as truths are errors. Thinking is really inaccurate perception, it looks for similarities and overlooks differences, thereby producing a false picture of reality. There is no such thing as substance, there is nothing permanent; there is no universal causal nexus; there is no purpose in nature, no definite goal. The universe does not care for our happiness of morality, there is no divine power outside that can help us. Our vanity of course hinders us from accepting the view that there is no purpose, no goal in the universe. "The total character of the universe is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense that necessity is wanting in it, but in the sense that it is without order, organization, beauty, form, wisdom and whatever else our esthetic anthropomorphism may put into it. Judged by our reason the misses are the rule, the exceptions are not the secret goal, and the whole play eternally repeats its air which can never be called a melody; and finally the expression unlucky throw or miss, is a human way of talking which implies reproach. But how can we either praise or blame the All?" "Man is a little exaggerated animal that—fortunately—has had its day; life on the earth is only a moment, an episode, an exception without consequence, something that has almost no significance for the total character of the earth; the earth itself, like every star, is a hiatus between two nothings, an event without plan, reason, will, self-consciousness, the worst kind of necessity, stupid necessity. Against this view something in us protests; the serpent vanity persuades us: 'all that must be false for it makes us indignant. Could it not all be mere semblance?'"

All these propositions, then, that have been accepted as universal truths are merely errors and illusions, phantoms of the imagination; the belief in a God and in a supersensuous world, in an abiding world, is an illusion. Knowledge is a tool for power. The utility for preservation is the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge. We arrange the world so in our thoughts as to make our existence possible; hence we believe in something permanent and regularly recurring. We reduce the confused plurality of experiences offered to us, to a rational and manageable scheme by means of formulas and signs which we invent; the purpose being to deceive ourselves in a useful way. In this sense the will for truth is the will to become master of the plurality of sensations—to string the phenomena on certain categories. A species understands so much of reality as is