The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
670.
_The belief in "emotions"_--Emotions are a fabrication of the intellect, an invention of _causes_ which do not exist. All general _bodily sensations_ which we do not understand are interpreted intellectually--that is to say, a _reason_ is sought why we feel thus or thus among certain people or in certain experiences. Thus something disadvantageous dangerous, and strange is taken for granted, as if it were the cause of our being indisposed; as a matter of fact, it gets _added to_ the indisposition, so as to make our condition thinkable.--Mighty rushes of blood to the brain, accompanied by a feeling of suffocation, are _interpreted_ as anger: the people and things which provoke our anger are a means of relieving our physiological condition. Subsequently, after long habituation, certain processes and general feelings are so regularly correlated that the sight of certain processes provokes that condition of general feeling, and induces vascular engorgements, the ejection of seminal fluid, etc.: we then say that the "emotion is provoked by propinquity." _Judgments_ already inhere in pleasure and pain: stimuli become differentiated, according as to whether they increase or reduce the feeling of power. _The belief in willing._ To believe that a thought may be the cause of a mechanical movement is to believe in miracles. The _consistency of science_ demands that once we have made the world _thinkable_ for ourselves by means of pictures, we should also make the emotions, the desires, the will, etc., _thinkable_--that is to say, we should _deny_ them and treat them as _errors of the intellect._
Free will or no free will?--There is _no such thing_ as "_Will_": that is only a simplified conception on the part of the understanding, like "matter." _All actions must first be prepared and made possible mechanically before they can be willed._ Or, _in most cases_ the "_object_" of an action enters the brain only after everything is prepared for its accomplishment. The object is an inner "stimulus"--nothing _more._ The most proximate prelude to an action relates to that action: but _further back still_ there lies a preparatory history which covers _a far wider field:_ the individual action is only a factor in a much more extensive and _subsequent_ fact. The shorter and the longer processes are not reported. The theory of _chance:_ the soul is a selecting and self-nourishing being, which is persistently extremely clever and creative (this _creative_ power is commonly overlocked! it is taken to be merely passive). I recognised the _active_ and creative _power_ within the accidental.--Accident is in itself nothing more than _the clashing of creative impulses._
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.