But let’s think this over. It’s time we did. “How are synthetic judgments a prior possible?” Kant asked himself. And what did his answer essentially amount to? Thanks to a faculty [Vermöge eines Vermögens]. However, unfortunately he did not answer in three words, but so labouriously, venerably, and with such an expenditure of German profundity and flourishes that people failed to hear the comical niaiserie allemande [German stupidity] inherent in such an answer. People even got really excited about this new faculty, and the rejoicing reached its height when Kant discovered yet another additional faculty—a moral faculty—in human beings, for then the Germans were still moral and not yet at all “political realists.” Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the young theologians of the Tubingen seminary went off right away into the bushes—all looking for “faculties.” And what didn’t they find—in that innocent, rich, still youthful time of the German spirit, in which Romanticism, that malicious fairy, played her pipes and sang, a time when people did not yet know how to distinguish between “finding” and “inventing”! Above all, a faculty for the “super-sensory.” Schelling christened this intellectual contemplation and, in so doing, complied with the most heartfelt yearnings of his Germans, whose cravings were basically pious.9—The most unfair thing we can do to this entire rapturously enthusiastic movement, which was adolescent, no matter how much it boldly dressed itself up in gray and antique ideas, is to take it seriously and treat it with something like moral indignation. Enough—people grew older—the dream flew away. There came a time when people rubbed their foreheads. People are still rubbing them today. They had dreamed: first and foremost—the old Kant. “By means of a faculty,” he had said, or at least meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather a repetition of the question? How does opium make people sleep? “By means of a faculty,” namely, the virtus dormitiva [sleeping virtue], answered that doctor in Moliere.
Because it has the sleeping virtue
whose nature makes the senses sleep.10
But answers like that belong in comedy, and the time has finally come to replace the Kantian question “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” with another question, “Why is the belief in such judgments necessary?”— that is, to understand that for the purposes of preserving beings of our type we must believe that such judgments are true, although, of course, they could still be false judgments! Or to speak more clearly, crudely, and fundamentally: synthetic judgments a priori should not “be possible” at all: we have no right to them. In our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Of course, it’s true that a belief in their truth is necessary as a foreground belief and appearance which belong in the perspective optics of living. In order finally to recall the immense influence which “German philosophy”— you understand, I hope, its right to quotation marks?—has exercised throughout Europe, there should be no doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva [virtue of making people sleep] was a part of that: people—among them noble loafers, the virtuous, the mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurantists of all nations—were delighted to have, thanks to German philosophy, an antidote to the still overpowering sensuality which flowed over from the previous century into this one, in short—to have a “sensus assoupire” [way of putting the senses to sleep].
12
So far as the materialistic atomism is concerned, it belongs with the most effectively refuted things we have, and perhaps nowadays in Europe no scholar remains so unscholarly that he still ascribes a serious meaning to it other than for convenient hand-and-household use (that is, as an abbreviated way of expressing oneself)—thanks primarily to that Pole Boscovich, who, together with the Pole Copernicus, has so far been the greatest and most victorious opponent of appearances. For while Copernicus convinced us to believe, contrary to all our senses, that the earth did not stand still, Boscovich taught us to renounce the belief in the final thing which made the earth “stand firm,” the belief in “stuff,” in “material,” in what was left of the earth, in atomic particles. It was the greatest triumph over the senses which has ever been achieved on earth so far.11 But we must go even further and also declare war, a relentless war to the bitter end, against the “atomistic need,” which still carries on a dangerous afterlife in places where no one suspects, like that celebrated “metaphysical need.”— We must at the start also get rid of that other and more disastrous atomism, which Christianity has taught best and longest, the atomism of the soul. With this phrase let me be permitted to designate the belief which assumes that the soul is something indestructible, eternal, indivisible— like a monad, like an atomon. We should rid scientific knowledge of this belief! Just between us, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” itself and to renounce one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses, as habitually happens with the clumsiness of the naturalists, who hardly touch upon “the soul” without losing it. But the way to new versions and refinements of the hypothesis of the soul stands open: and ideas like “mortal soul” and “soul as the multiplicity of the subject” and “soul as the social structure of drives and affects” from now on want to have civil rights in scientific knowledge. While the new psychologist is preparing an end to superstition, which so far has flourished with an almost tropical lushness in the way the soul has been imagined, at the same time he has naturally pushed himself, as it were, into a new desert and a new mistrust—it may be the case that the older psychologists had a more comfortable and happier time —; finally, however, he knows that in that very process he himself is condemned also to invent, and—who knows?—perhaps to discover.
13
Physiologists should think carefully about setting up the drive to preserve the self as the cardinal drive in an organic being. Above everything else, something living wants to release its power—living itself is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of that. In short, here as everywhere, beware of extraneous teleological principles! The drive for self-preservation is one such principle (we have Spinoza’s inconsistency to thank for it —). For the essential principle of economy must hold—that’s what method demands.
14
Nowadays in perhaps five or six heads the idea is dawning that even physics is only an interpretation and explication of the world (for our benefit, if I may be permitted to say so) and not an explanation of the world. But to the extent it rests upon a faith in the senses, it counts for more and must continue to count for more for a long time yet, that is, as an explanation. Physics has eyes and fingers on its side; it has appearance and tangibility on its side. That works magically on an age with basically plebeian taste— persuasively and convincingly—indeed, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensuality. What is clear, what is “explained”? Only whatever lets itself be seen and felt—every problem has to be pushed that far. By contrast, the reluctance to accept obvious evidence of the senses constituted the magic of the Platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking—perhaps among human beings who enjoyed even stronger and more discriminating senses than our contemporaries have, but who knew how to experience a higher triumph in remaining master of these senses and to do this by means of the pale, cool, gray, conceptual nets which they threw over the colourful confusion of sense, the rabble of the senses, as Plato called them. That form of enjoyment in overcoming this world and interpreting the world in the manner of Plato was different from the one which today’s physicists offer us, as well as the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological workers, with their principle of the “smallest possible force” and the greatest possible stupidity. “Where human beings have nothing more to look at and to grip, there they have also no more to seek out”— that is, of course, an imperative different from the Platonic one, but nonetheless for a crude, diligent race of mechanics and bridge builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do, it might be precisely the right imperative.
15
In order to carry on physiology in good conscience, people must hold to the principle that the sense organs are not