But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths[11] differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness, for the service of being, and not to that side of the waking-consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths. Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact. It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the _value_ of truth and knowledge--cheap and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant, who regards his whole _raison d’être_ as impugned by it. Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting. It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can only _believe_ in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage. Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unravelled and questions answered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child’s eyes, that terrible dowry of human waking-consciousness which compels the understanding, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to probe into every deep for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions? “Shuddering awe is mankind’s noblest part.” He to whom that gift has been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect, and destroy the awe-inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge therefrom. The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to “establish,” stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has _conquered_ when it has completed the business of making rigid.