The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
660.
_The Body as an Empire._ The aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (the fight between the cells and the tissues). Slavery and the division of labour: the higher type alone possible through the _subjection_ of the lower to a function. Pleasure and pain, not contraries. The feeling of power. "Nutrition" only a result of the insatiable lust of appropriation in the Will to Power. "Procreation": this is the decay which supervenes when the ruling cells are too weak to organise appropriated material. It is the _moulding_ force which will have a continual supply of new material (more "force"). The masterly construction of an organism out of an egg. "The mechanical interpretation": recognises only quantities: but the real energy is in the quality. Mechanics can therefore only describe processes; it cannot explain them. "Purpose." We should start out from the "sagacity" of plants. The concept of "meliorism": _not_ only greater complexity, but greater _power_ (it need not be only greater masses). Conclusion concerning the evolution of man: the road to perfection lies in the bringing forth of the most powerful individuals, for whose use the great masses would be converted into mere tools (that is to say, into the most intelligent and flexible tools possible). Why is all _activity,_ even that of a _sense,_ associated with pleasure? Because, before the activity was possible, an obstacle or a burden was done away with. Or, rather, because all action is a process of overcoming, of becoming master of, and of _increasing_ the _feeling of power_? The pleasure of thought. Ultimately it is not only the feeling of power, but also the pleasure of creating and of contemplating the _creation:_ for all activity enters our consciousness in the form of "works." Creating is an act of selecting and of finishing the thing selected. (In every act of the will, this is the essential element.) All phenomena which are the result of intentions may be reduced to _the intention of increasing power._
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.