(4) The question how things-in-themselves are constituted, quite apart from our sense-receptivity and from the activity of our understanding, must be answered by the further question: how were we able to know _that things existed?_ "Thingness" is one of our own inventions. The question is whether there are not a good many more ways of creating such a world of appearance--and whether this creating, rationalising, adjusting, and falsifying be not the best-guaranteed _reality_ itself: in short, whether that which "fixes the meaning of things" is not the only reality: and whether the "effect of environment upon us" be not merely the result of such will-exercising subjects.... The other "creatures" act upon us; our _adjusted_ world of appearance is an arrangement and an _overpowering_ of its activities: a sort of _defensive_ measure. _The subject alone is demonstrable_; the _hypothesis_ might be advanced _that subjects are all that exist,_--that "object" is only a form of action of subject upon subject ... a _modus of the subject._ _(k)_ The Metaphysical Need. 570. If one resembles all the philosophers that have gone before, one can have no eyes for what has existed and what will exist--one sees only what _is._ But as there is no such thing as Being; all that the philosophers had to deal with was a host of _fancies,_ this was their "world." 571. To assert the _existence_ as a whole of things concerning which we know nothing, simply because there is an advantage in not being able to know anything of them, was a piece of artlessness on Kant's part, and the result of the recoil-stroke of certain needs--especially in the realm of morals and metaphysics. 572. An artist cannot endure reality; he turns away or back from it: his earnest opinion is that the worth of a thing consists in that nebulous residue of it which one derives from colour, form, sound, and thought; he believes that the more subtle, attenuated, and volatile, a thing or a man becomes, _the more valuable he becomes: the less real,_ the greater the worth. This is Platonism: but Plato was guilty of yet further audacity in the matter of turning tables--he measured the degree of reality according to the degree of value, and said: The more there is of "idea" the more there is of Being. He twisted the concept "reality" round and said: "What ye regard as real is an error, and the nearer we get to the 'idea' the nearer we are to 'truth.'"--Is this understood? It was the _greatest of all rechristenings:_ and because Christianity adopted it, we are blind to its astounding features. At bottom, Plato, like the artist he was, _placed appearance before_ Being! and therefore lies and fiction before truth! unreality before actuality!--He was, however, so convinced of the value of appearance, that he granted it the attributes of "Being," "causality," "goodness," and "truth," and, in short, all those things which are associated with value.