The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
535.
According to my way of thinking, "truth" does not necessarily mean the opposite of error, but, in the most fundamental cases, merely the relation of different errors to each other: thus one error might be older, deeper than another, perhaps altogether ineradicable, one without which organic creatures like ourselves could not exist; whereas other errors might not tyrannise over us to that extent as conditions of existence, but when measured according to the standard of those other "tyrants," could even be laid aside and "refuted." Why should an irrefutable assumption necessarily be "true"? This question may exasperate the logicians who limit _things_ according to the limitations they find in themselves: but I have long since declared war with this logician's optimism. Everything simple is simply imaginary, but not "true." That which is real and true is, however, neither a unity nor reducible to a unity. _What is truth?_--Inertia; _that_ hypothesis which brings satisfaction, the smallest expense of intellectual strength, etc. First proposition. The _easier_ way of thinking always triumphs over the more difficult way;--_dogmatically_: _simplex sigillum veri_.--_Dico_: to suppose that _clearness_ is any proof of truth, is absolute childishness. . . . Second proposition. The teaching of Being, of things, and of all those constant entities, is a _hundred times more easy_ than the teaching of _Becoming_ and of evolution. . .
Third proposition. Logic was intended to be a method of _facilitating_ thought: a _means of expression_, --not truth. . . . Later on it got to _act_ like truth. . . . Parmenides said: "One can form no concept of the non-existent";--we are at the other extreme, and say, "That Of which a concept can be formed, is certainly fictional." There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes--therefore there must be many kinds of "truths," and consequently there can be no truth. _Inscriptions over the porch of a modern lunatic asylum._ "That which is necessarily true in thought must be necessarily true in morality."--HERBERT SPENCER. "The ultimate test of the truth of a proposition is the inconceivableness of its negation,"--HERBERT SPENCER. If the character of existence were false,:--and this would be possible,--what would truth then be, all our truth? ... An unprincipled falsification of the false? A higher degree of falseness? ...
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