dead and done with, it is bad taste to discuss them in a secular work; if they are dead and done with, it is worse taste, and a waste of time to lug them into the light of day: arguments that seem to me unanswerable; but here am I with these dead things to bury, and my message to deliver. What the theologian calls God, the metaphysician calls by various names. One will tell you that the world is a Will to Live rushing into being. Another will say, "That does not account for man: if a Will to Live is the thing in itself, man is _de trop_, for man is the greatest foe life has. Other animals kill only to satisfy hunger; but man, although for food and for sport he preserves life, yet for sport, for food, for adornment, and to make room for himself, man has destroyed, and continues to destroy, life by whole species, including those of his own kind. No, there is something behind the Will to Live, and that is the Will to Power. A Will to Power accounts for man; man, the tamer of the tide, of the lion and the lightning; and man, the tamer of man." But anyone can make a metaphysic; it is a splendid image, that of splitting logs. Thus we can prove easily that the world is a Will to Death; for that indeed is the end of a pessimistic philosophy, the suicide of the race. I have, myself, made and applied a perfect metaphysic in the few hundred lines of the "Testament of a Vivisector," where the thing in itself is represented as a Will to Know: "It may be Matter in itself is pain Sweetened in sexual love, that so mankind, The medium of Matter's consciousness, May never cease to know--the stolid bent Of Matter, the infinite vanity Of the Universe being evermore self-knowledge."