The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
689.
_"Will to power" and causality._--From a psychological point of view the idea of "cause" is our feeling of power in the act which is called willing--our concept effect is the superstition that this feeling of power is itself the force which moves things.... A state which accompanies an event and is already an effect of that event is deemed "sufficient cause" of the latter; the tense relationship of our feeling of power (pleasure as the feeling of power) and of an obstacle being overcome--are these things illusions? If we translate the notion "cause" back into the only sphere which is known to us, and out of which we have taken it, we cannot imagine _any change_ in which the will to power is not inherent. We do not know how to account for any change which is not a _trespassing_ of one power on another. Mechanics only show us the results, and then only in images (movement is a figure of speech); gravitation itself has no mechanical cause, because it is itself the first cause of mechanical results. The will to _accumulate force_ is confined to the phenomenon of life, to nourishment, to procreation, to inheritance, to society, states, customs, authority. Should we not be allowed to assume that this will is the motive power also of chemistry?--and of the cosmic order?
Not only conservation of energy, but the minimum amount of waste; so that the only reality is this: _the will of every centre of power to become stronger_--not self-preservation, but the desire to appropriate, to become master, to become more, to become stronger. Is the fact that science is possible a proof of the principle of causation--"From like causes, like effects"--"A permanent law of things"--"Invariable order"? Because something is calculable, is it therefore on that account necessary? If something happens thus, and thus only, it is not the manifestation of a "principle," of a "law," of "order." What happens is that certain quanta of power begin to operate, and their essence is to exercise their power over all other quanta of power. Can we assume the existence of a striving after power without a feeling of pleasure and pain, _i.e._ without the sensation of an increase or a decrease of power? Is mechanism only a language of signs for the concealed fact of a world of fighting and conquering quanta of will-power? All mechanical first-principles, matter, atoms, weight, pressure, and repulsion, are not facts in themselves, but interpretations arrived at with the help of psychical fictions. Life, which is our best known form of being, is altogether "will to the accumulation of strength"--all the processes of life hinge on this: everything aims, not at preservation, but at accretion and accumulation. Life as an individual case (a hypothesis which may be applied to existence in general) strives after the maximum feeling of power; life is essentially a striving after more power; striving itself is only a straining after more power; the most fundamental and innermost thing of all is this will. (Mechanism is merely the semeiotics of the results.) The thing which is the cause of the existence of development cannot in the course of investigation be found above development; it should neither be regarded as "evolving" nor as evolved ... the "will to power" cannot have been evolved. What is the relation of the whole of the organic process towards the rest of nature?--Here the fundamental will reveals itself.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.