The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
544.
_"Dissimulation"_ increases in accordance with the rising _order of rank_ among organic beings. In the inorganic world it seems to be entirely absent. There power opposes power quite roughly _--ruse_ begins in the organic world; plants are already masters of it. The greatest men, such as Cæsar and Napoleon (see Stendhal's remark concerning him),[3] as also the higher races (the Italians), the Greeks (Odysseus); the most supreme cunning, belongs to the very _essence_ of the elevation of man. ... The problem of the actor. My Dionysian ideal.... The optics of all the organic functions, of all the strongest vital instincts: the power which _will_ have error in all life; error as the very first principle of thought itself. Before "thought" is possible, "fancy" must first have done its work; the _picturing_ of identical cases, of the _seemingness_ of identity, is more primeval than the cognition of identity. _(h)_ Against Causality. I believe in absolute space as the basis of force, and I believe the latter to be limited and formed. Time, eternal. But space and time as things in themselves do not exist. "Changes" are only appearances (or mere processes of our senses to us); if we set recurrence, however regular, between them, nothing is proved beyond the fact that it has always happened so. The feeling that _post hoc_ is _propter hoc,_ is easily explained as the result of a misunderstanding, it is comprehensible. But appearances cannot be "causes"!
The interpretation of a phenomenon, _either_ as an action _or_ as the endurance of an action (that is to say, every action involves the suffering of it), amounts to this: every change, every differentiation, presupposes the existence of an agent and somebody acted upon, _who_ is "altered." Psychological history of the concept _subject._ The body, the thing, the "whole," which is visualised by the eye, awakens the thought of distinguishing between an action and an agent; the idea that the agent is the cause of the action, after having been repeatedly refined, at length left the "subject" over. Our absurd habit of regarding a mere mnemonic sign or abbreviated formula as an independent being, and ultimately as a _cause_; as, for instance, when we say of lightning that it flashes, even the little word "I." A sort of double-sight in seeing which makes sight a _cause of seeing in itself_: this was the feat in the invention of the "subject" of the "ego." "Subject," "object," "attribute"--these distinctions have been _made,_ and are now used like schemes to cover all apparent facts. The false fundamental observation is this, that I believe it is I who does something, who suffers something, who "has" something, who "has" a quality.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.