The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
656.
The will to power can manifest itself only against _obstacles;_ it therefore goes in search of what resists it--this is the primitive tendency of the protoplasm when it extends its _pseudopodia_ and feels about it. The act of appropriation and assimilation is, above all, the result of a desire to overpower, a process of forming, of additional building and rebuilding, until at last the subjected creature has become completely a part of the superior creature's sphere of power, and has increased the latter.--If this process of incorporation does not succeed, then the whole organism falls to pieces; and the _separation_ occurs as the result of the will to power: in order to prevent the escape of that which has been subjected, the will to power falls into two wills (under some circumstances without even abandoning completely its relation to the two). "Hunger" is only a more narrow adaptation, once the fundamental instinct of power has won power of a more abstract kind. What is "passive"? To be hindered in the outward movement of grasping: it is thus an act of resistance and reaction. What is "active"? To stretch out for power. "Nutrition"... Is only a derived phenomenon; the primitive form of it was the will to stuff everything inside one's own skin. "Procreation"... Only derived; originally, in those cases In which one will was unable to organise the collective mass it had appropriated, an _opposing will_ came into power, which undertook to effect the separation and establish a new centre of organisation, after a struggle with the original will. "Pleasure"... Is a feeling of power (presupposing the existence of pain).
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.