The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
626.
"_The feeling of force_ cannot proceed from movement: feeling in general cannot proceed from movement." "Even in support of this, an apparent experience is the only evidence: in a substance (brain) feeling is generated through transmitted motion (stimuli). But generated? Would this show that the feeling did _not_ yet exist there _at all_? so that its appearance would _have_ to be regarded as the _creative act_ of the intermediary--motion? The feelingless condition of this substance is only an hypothesis! not an experience! Feeling, therefore is the _quality_ of the substance: there actually are substances that feel." "Do we learn from certain substances that they have _no_ feeling? No, we merely cannot tell that they have any. It is impossible to seek the origin of feeling in non-sensitive substance."--_Oh what hastiness!_ "To attract" and "to repel", in a purely mechanical sense, is pure fiction: a word. We cannot imagine an attraction without a _purpose.--_ Either the will to possess one's self of a thing, or the will to defend one's self from a thing or to repel it--_that_ we "understand"; that would be an interpretation which we could use. In short, the psychological necessity of believing in causality lies in the _impossibility of imagining a process without a purpose_: but of course this says nothing concerning truth or untruth (the justification of such a belief)! The belief in _causæ_ collapses with the belief in τέλει (against Spinoza and his causationism).
It is an illusion to suppose that something is _known,_ when all we have is a mathematical formula of what has happened; it is only _characterised, described;_ no more! If I bring a regularly recurring phenomenon into a formula, I have facilitated and shortened my task of characterising the whole phenomenon, etc. But I have not thereby ascertained a "law," I have only replied to the question: How is it that something recurs here? It is a supposition that the formula corresponds to a complex of really unknown forces and the discharge of forces; it is pure mythology to suppose that forces here obey a law, so that, as the result of their obedience, we have the same phenomenon every time. I take good care not to speak of chemical "_laws_": to do so savours of morality. It is much more a question of establishing certain relations of power: the stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot maintain its degree of independence,--here there is no pity, no quarter, and, still less, any observance of "law."
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.