The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
632.
The "regularity" of a sequence is only a metaphorical expression, not a fact, just _as if_ a rule were followed here! And the same holds good of "conformity to law." We find a formula in order to express an ever-recurring kind of succession of phenomena: but that does not show that we have _discovered a law_; much less a force which is the cause of a recurrence of effects. The fact that something always happens thus or thus, is interpreted here as if a creature always acted thus or thus as the result of obedience to a law or to a lawgiver: whereas apart from the "law" it would be free to act differently. But precisely that inability to act otherwise might originate in the creature itself, it might be that it did not act thus or thus in response to a law, but simply because it was so constituted. It would mean simply: that something cannot also be something else; that it cannot be first this, and then something quite different; that it is neither free nor the reverse, but merely thus or thus. _The fault lies in thinking a subject into things._ To speak of two consecutive states, the first as "cause," and the second as "effect," is false. The first state cannot bring about anything, the second has nothing effected in it. It is a question of a struggle between two elements unequal in power: a new adjustment is arrived at, according to the measure of power each possesses. The second state is something fundamentally different from the first (it is not its effect): the essential thing Is, that the factors which engage in the struggle leave it with different quanta of power.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.