The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
_B._
_The first step to reason:_ to understand to what extent we have been _seduced,_--for it might be _precisely_ the reverse: _(a)_ The _unknown_ world could be so constituted as to give us a liking for "this" world--it may be a more stupid and meaner form of existence. _(b)_ The other world, very far from taking account of our desires which were never realised here, might be part of the mass of things which _this_ world makes possible for us; to learn to know this world would be a means of satisfying us, _(c)_ The _true_ world: but who actually says that the apparent world must be of less value than the true world? Do not our instincts contradict this judgment? Is not man eternally occupied in creating an imaginative world, because he will have a better world than reality? _In the first place,_ how do we know that _our_ world is _not_ the true world? ... for it might be that the other world is the world of "appearance" (as a matter of fact, the Greeks, for instance, actually imagined a _region of shadows, a life of appearance,_ beside _real_ existence). And finally, what right have we to establish _degrees of reality,_ as it were? That is something different from an unknown world--that is already the _will to know something of the unknown._ The "other," the "unknown" world--good! but to speak of the "true world" is as good as "_knowing_ something about it,"--that is the _contrary_ of the assumption of an _x_-world.... In short, the world _x_ might be in every way a more tedious, a more inhuman, and a less dignified world than this one. It would be quite another matter if it were assumed that there were several _x_-worlds--that is to say, every possible kind of world besides our own. But this has _never been assumed...._
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.