Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/731

Rh necessary to master it. Hence logic and the categories of reason are simply a means of arranging the world for utility purposes, of arranging it so that we can handle it. But the philosophers have made the mistake of regarding these categories, these formulas, these handy forms, as criteria of truth, as criteria of reality; they have naïvely made this human way of looking at things for the sake of preservation, this anthropocentric idiosyncracy, the measure of things, the standard of the 'real' and 'unreal.' And in this way it came to pass that the world was divided into a real world and a seeming world, and that the very world to live in which man had. invented his reason, this world of change, of becoming, plurality, opposition, contradiction, war, was discredited and calumniated, that it, the real world, was called a world of semblance, a mere appearance, a false world, and that the invented fictitious world, the alleged world of permanence, the unchanging, supersensuous world, the false world, was enthroned as the true world.

All we do know directly is the world of our desires and instincts, and all our instincts may be reduced to the fundamental instinct—the will for power. Every living being strives to increase its power by vanquishing other beings; this is the law of life. Indeed, every specific body strives to become master of the whole of space and to extend its force (its will for power), and to repel everything that resists its extension. But it constantly meets with similar strivings of other bodies and ends by falling in line ('uniting') with those that are sufficiently related to it—and they then conspire for power together. The world is a monster of force without beginning or end, a fixed iron quantity of power which does not become greater or less, which is not used up, but transformed, a household without income or outgo. And this world repeats itself forever and forever. All things return eternally, Nietzsche teaches, and we ourselves with them; we have been here before an infinite number of times and all things with us; and we and all things shall come again eternally, shall live over again the same lives even to the smallest details. The knot of causes returns in which I am tied—that will create me again. I shall come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or to a similar life, but to this same life. "And this slow spider which is crawling along in the moon-light, and this moon-light itself and I and you in the doorway whispering to each other, whispering about eternal things—must we not all have been here before? and must we not all come back again, and walk in that highway of eternity stretched out there before us, in that long and hideous high-way must we not return eternally."

These are the fundamental ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. As we have seen there is a central thought running through his entire work, an ideal, that is they key to his whole philosophy of life and helps us