The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
635.
We are in need of "unities" in order to be able to reckon: but this is no reason for supposing that "unities" actually _exist._ We borrowed the concept "unity" from our concept "ego,"--our very oldest article of faith. If we did not believe ourselves to be unities we should never have formed the concept "thing." Now--that is to say, somewhat late in the day, we are overwhelmingly convinced that our conception of the concept "ego" is no security whatever for a real entity. In order to maintain the mechanical interpretation of the world theoretically, we must always make the reserve that it is with fictions that we do so: the concept of _movement_ (derived from the language of our senses) and the concept of the _atom_ (= entity, derived from our psychical experience) are based upon a _sense-prejudice_ and a _psychological prejudice._ Mechanics formulates consecutive phenomena, and it does so semeiologically, in the terms of the senses and of the mind (that all influence is _movement_; that where there is movement something is at work moving): it does not touch the question of the causal force. The _mechanical_ world is imagined as the eye and the sense of touch alone could imagine a world (as "moved"),--in such a way as to be calculable,--as to simulate causal entities "things" (atoms) whose effect is constant (the transfer of the false concept of subject to the concept atom).
The mixing together of the concept of numbers, of the concept of thing (the idea of subject), of the concept of activity (the separation of that which is the cause, and the effect), of the concept of movement: all these things are phenomenal; our eye and our _psychology_ are still in it all. If we eliminate these adjuncts, nothing remains over but dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: the essence of which resides in their relation to all other quanta, in their "influence" upon the latter. The will to power, not Being, not Becoming, but a _pathos_--is the elementary fact, from these first results a Becoming, an influencing....
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