The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
478.
Phenomenalism must not be sought in the wrong quarter: nothing is more phenomenal, or, to be more precise, nothing is so much _deception,_ as this inner world, which we observe with the "inner sense." Our belief that the will is a cause was so great, that, according to our personal experiences in general, we projected a cause into all phenomena (_i.e._ a certain motive is posited as the cause of all phenomena). We believe that the thoughts which follow one upon the other in our minds are linked by some sort of causal relation: the logician, more especially, who actually speaks of a host of facts which have never once been seen in reality, has grown accustomed to the prejudice that thoughts _are the cause_ of thoughts. We believe--and even our philosophers believe it still--that pleasure and pain are the causes of reactions, that the very purpose of pleasure and pain is to occasion reactions. For hundreds of years, pleasure and pain have been represented as the _motives_ for every action. Upon reflection, however, we are bound to concede that everything would have proceeded in exactly the same way, according to precisely the same sequence of cause and effect, if the states "pleasure" and "pain" had been entirely absent; and that we are simply deceived when we believe that they actually cause anything:--they are the _attendant phenomena,_ and they have quite a different purpose from that of provoking reactions; they are in themselves effects involved in the process of reaction which takes place. _In short:_ Everything that becomes conscious is a final phenomenon, a conclusion--and is the cause of nothing; all succession of phenomena in consciousness is absolutely atomistic.--And we tried to understand the universe from the _opposite_ point of view--as if nothing were effective or real, save thinking, feeling, willing! ...
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