However, let us not overlook the importance of the doctrine of the will to power either in its relation to Nietzsche's writings or in its application to ourselves. By this doctrine the philosopher wished to make mankind realise its great dormant power. The insistence on the human basis of all things was no more than a call to arms--an attempt to instil courage in men who had attributed all great phenomena to supernatural forces and had therefore acquiesced before them instead of having endeavoured to conquer them. Nietzsche's object was to make man surer of himself, to infuse him with pride, to imbue him with more daring, to awaken him to a full realisation of his possibilities. This, in brief, is the teaching of the will to power reduced to its immediate influences. In this doctrine is preached a new virility. Not the sedentary virility of compromise, but the virility which is born of struggle and suffering, which is a sign of one's great love of living. Nietzsche offered a new set of vital ideals to supplant the decadent ones which now govern us. Resolute faith, the power of affirmation, initiative, pride, courage and fearlessness--these are the rewards in the exercise of the will to power. The strength of great love and the vitality of great deeds, as well as the possibility of rare and vigorous growth, lie within this doctrine of will. Its object is to give back to us the life we have lost--the life of beauty and plenitude, of strength and exuberance. EXCERPTS FROM "THE WILL TO POWER" volume II For hundreds of years, pleasure and pain have been represented as the _motives_ for every action. Upon reflection, however, we are bound to concede that everything would have proceeded in exactly the same way, according to precisely the same sequence of cause and effect, if the states "pleasure" and "pain" had been entirely absent. 8-9 The _measure_ of the desire for knowledge depends upon the extent to which _the Will to Power_ grows in a certain species: a species gets a grasp of a given amount of reality, _in order to master it, in order to enlist that amount in its service._ 12 It is our needs that _interpret the world;_ our instincts and their impulses for and against. Every instinct is a sort of thirst for power.... 13 That a belief, however useful it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with the truth, may be seen from the fact that we _must_ believe in time, space, and motion, without feeling ourselves compelled to regard them as absolute realities. 16 _Truth is that hind of error_ without which a certain species of living being cannot exist. 20 In the formation of reason, logic, and the categories, it was a _need_ in us that was the determining power: not the need "to know," but to classify, to schematise, for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation. 29