The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
477.
I am convinced of the phenomenalism of the _inner_ world also: everything that reaches our consciousness is utterly and completely adjusted, simplified, schematised, interpreted, the _actual_ process of inner "perception," the _relation of causes_ between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, is absolutely concealed from us, and may be purely imaginary. This "_inner_ world of appearance" is treated with precisely the same forms and procedures as the "outer" world. We never come across a single "fact": pleasure and pain are more recently evolved intellectual phenomena.... Causality evades us; to assume the existence of an immediate causal relation between thoughts, as Logic does, is the result of the coarsest and most clumsy observation. There are _all sorts of passions_ that may intervene between two thoughts: but the interaction is too rapid--that is why we _fail to recognise_ them, that is why we actually _deny_ their existence.... "Thinking," as the epistemologists understand _\r_ it, never takes place at all: it is an absolutely gratuitous fabrication, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and by eliminating all the rest--an artificial adjustment for the purpose of the understanding.... The "mind," _something that thinks_: at times, even, "the mind absolute and pure"--this concept is an evolved and second result of false introspection, which believes in "thinking": in the first place an act is imagined here which does not really occur at all, _i.e._ "thinking"; and, _secondly,_ a subject-substratum is imagined in which every process of this thinking has its origin, and nothing else--that is to say, _both the action and the agent are fanciful._
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