The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
634.
_A. criticism of Materialism._--Let us dismiss the two popular concepts, Necessity and Law, from this idea: the first introduces a false constraint, the second a false liberty into the world. "Things" do not act regularly, they follow no _rule:_ there are no things (that is our fiction); neither do they act in accordance with any necessity. There is no obedience here: for, the fact that _something is_ as it is, strong or weak, is not the result of obedience or of a rule or of a constraint.... The degree of resistance and the degree of superior power--this is the question around which all phenomena turn: if we, for our own purposes and calculations, know how to express this in formulas and "laws," all the better for us! But that does not mean that we have introduced any "morality" into the world, just because we have fancied it as obedient. There are no laws: every power draws its last consequence at every moment. Things are calculable precisely owing to the fact that there is no possibility of their being otherwise than they are. A quantum of power is characterised by the effect it produces and the influence it resists. The adiaphoric state which would be thinkable in itself, is entirely lacking. It is essentially a will to violence and a will to defend one's self against violence. It is not self-preservation: every atom exercises its influence over the whole of existence--it is thought out of existence if one thinks this radiation of will-power away. That is why I call it a quantum of "_Will to Power_"; with this formula one can express the character which cannot be abstracted in thought from mechanical order, without suppressing the latter itself in thought.
The translation of the world of effect into a _visible_ world--a world for the eye--is the concept "movement." Here it is always understood that _something_ has been moved,--whether it be the fiction of an atomic globule or even of the abstraction of the latter, the dynamic atom, something is always imagined that has an effect--that is to say, we have not yet rid ourselves of the habit into which our senses and speech inveigled us. Subject and object, an agent to the action, the action and that which does it separated: we must not forget that all this signifies no more than semeiotics and--nothing real. Mechanics as a teaching of _movement_ is already a translation of phenomena into man's language of the senses.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.