Second proposition. The teaching of Being, of things, and of all those constant entities, is a _hundred times more easy_ than the teaching of _Becoming_ and of evolution. . . Third proposition. Logic was intended to be a method of _facilitating_ thought: a _means of expression_, --not truth. . . . Later on it got to _act_ like truth. . . . 539. Parmenides said: "One can form no concept of the non-existent";--we are at the other extreme, and say, "That Of which a concept can be formed, is certainly fictional." 540. There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes--therefore there must be many kinds of "truths," and consequently there can be no truth. 541. _Inscriptions over the porch of a modern lunatic asylum._ "That which is necessarily true in thought must be necessarily true in morality."--HERBERT SPENCER. "The ultimate test of the truth of a proposition is the inconceivableness of its negation,"--HERBERT SPENCER. 542. If the character of existence were false,:--and this would be possible,--what would truth then be, all our truth? ... An unprincipled falsification of the false? A higher degree of falseness? ... 543. In a world which was essentially false, truthfulness would be an _anti-natural tendency_: its only purpose would be to provide a means of attaining to a _higher degree of falsity._ For a world of truth and Being to be simulated, the truthful one would first have to be created (it being understood that he must believe himself to be "truthful"). Simple, transparent, not in contradiction with himself, lasting, remaining always the same to himself, free from faults, sudden changes, dissimulation, and form: such a man conceives a world of Being as "_God_" in His own image. In order that truthfulness may be possible, the whole sphere in which man moves must be very tidy, small, and respectable: the advantage in every respect must be with the truthful one.--Lies, tricks, dissimulations, must cause astonishment. 544. _"Dissimulation"_ increases in accordance with the rising _order of rank_ among organic beings. In the inorganic world it seems to be entirely absent. There power opposes power quite roughly _--ruse_ begins in the organic world; plants are already masters of it. The greatest men, such as Cæsar and Napoleon (see Stendhal's remark concerning him),[3] as also the higher races (the Italians), the Greeks (Odysseus); the most supreme cunning, belongs to the very _essence_ of the elevation of man. ... The problem of the actor. My Dionysian ideal.... The optics of all the organic functions, of all the strongest vital instincts: the power which _will_ have error in all life; error as the very first principle of thought itself. Before "thought" is possible, "fancy" must first have done its work; the _picturing_ of identical cases, of the _seemingness_ of identity, is more primeval than the cognition of identity.