"Even in support of this, an apparent experience is the only evidence: in a substance (brain) feeling is generated through transmitted motion (stimuli). But generated? Would this show that the feeling did _not_ yet exist there _at all_? so that its appearance would _have_ to be regarded as the _creative act_ of the intermediary--motion? The feelingless condition of this substance is only an hypothesis! not an experience! Feeling, therefore is the _quality_ of the substance: there actually are substances that feel." "Do we learn from certain substances that they have _no_ feeling? No, we merely cannot tell that they have any. It is impossible to seek the origin of feeling in non-sensitive substance."--_Oh what hastiness!_ 627. "To attract" and "to repel", in a purely mechanical sense, is pure fiction: a word. We cannot imagine an attraction without a _purpose.--_ Either the will to possess one's self of a thing, or the will to defend one's self from a thing or to repel it--_that_ we "understand"; that would be an interpretation which we could use. In short, the psychological necessity of believing in causality lies in the _impossibility of imagining a process without a purpose_: but of course this says nothing concerning truth or untruth (the justification of such a belief)! The belief in _causæ_ collapses with the belief in τέλει (against Spinoza and his causationism). 628. It is an illusion to suppose that something is _known,_ when all we have is a mathematical formula of what has happened; it is only _characterised, described;_ no more! 629. If I bring a regularly recurring phenomenon into a formula, I have facilitated and shortened my task of characterising the whole phenomenon, etc. But I have not thereby ascertained a "law," I have only replied to the question: How is it that something recurs here? It is a supposition that the formula corresponds to a complex of really unknown forces and the discharge of forces; it is pure mythology to suppose that forces here obey a law, so that, as the result of their obedience, we have the same phenomenon every time. 630. I take good care not to speak of chemical "_laws_": to do so savours of morality. It is much more a question of establishing certain relations of power: the stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot maintain its degree of independence,--here there is no pity, no quarter, and, still less, any observance of "law." 631. The unalterable sequence of certain phenomena does not prove any "law," but a relation of power between two or more forces. To say, "But it is precisely this relation that remains the same!" is no better than saying, "One and the same force cannot be another force."--It is not a matter of _sequence,_ but a matter of _interdependence,_ a process in which the procession of moments do _not_ determine each other after the manner of cause and effect....