The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
562.
"At some time in the development of thought, a point must have been reached when man became conscious of the fact that what he called the _qualities of a thing_ were merely the sensations of the feeling subject: and thus the qualities ceased from belonging to the thing." The "thing-in-itself" remained over. 'The distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-us, is based upon that older and artless observation which would fain grant energy to things: but analysis revealed that even force was only ascribed to them by our fancy, as was also--substance. "The thing affects a subject?" Thus the root of the idea of substance is in language, not in things outside ourselves! The thing-in-itself is not a problem at all! Being will have to be conceived as a sensation which is no longer based upon anything quite devoid of sensation. In movement no new _meaning_ is given to feeling. That which is, cannot be the substance of movement: it is therefore a form of Being. _N.B._--The explanation of life may be sought, in the first place, through mental images of phenomena which _precede_ it (purposes); Secondly, through mental images of phenomena which follow behind it (the mathematico-physical explanation). The two should not be confounded. Thus: the physical explanation, which is the symbolisation of the world by means of feeling and thought, cannot in itself make feeling and thinking originate again and show its derivation: physics must rather construct the world of feeling, consistently _without feeling or purpose _ right up to the highest man. And teleology is only a _history of purposes,_ and is never physical.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.