The assumption of a _single subject_ is perhaps not necessary, it may be equally permissible to assume a plurality of subjects, whose interaction and struggle lie at the bottom of our thought and our consciousness in general. A sort of _aristocracy_ of "cells" in which the ruling power is vested? Of course an aristocracy of equals, who are accustomed to ruling co-operatively, and understand how to command? _My hypotheses_. The subject as a plurality. Pain intellectual and dependent upon the judgment harmful, projected. The effect always "unconscious": the inferred and imagined cause is projected, it _follows_ the event. Pleasure is a form of pain. The only kind of power that exists is of the same nature as the power of will: a commanding of other subjects which thereupon alter themselves. The unremitting transientness and volatility of the subject. "Mortal soul." _Number_ as perspective form. 491. The belief in the body is more fundamental than the belief in the soul: the latter arose from the unscientific observation of the agonies of the body. (Something which leaves it. The belief in the _truth of dreams_) 492. The body and physiology the starting-point: why?--We obtain a correct image of the nature of our subject-entity, that is to say, as a number of regents at the head of a community (not as "souls" or as "life-forces") as also of the dependence of these regents upon their subjects, and upon the conditions of a hierarchy, and of the division of labour, as the means ensuring the existence of the part and the whole. We also obtain a correct image of the way in which the living entities continually come into being and expire, and we see how eternity cannot belong to the "subject"; we realise that the struggle finds expression in obeying as well as in commanding, and that a fluctuating definition of the limits of power is a factor of life. The comparative _ignorance_ in which the ruler is kept, of the individual performances and even disturbances taking place in the community, also belong to the conditions under which government may be carried on. In short, we obtain a valuation even of _want-of-knowledge,_ of seeing-things-generally-as-a-whole, of simplification, of falsification, and of perspective. What is most important, however, is, that we regard the ruler and his subjects as of the _same kind,_ all feeling, willing, thinking--and that wherever we see or suspect movement in a body, we conclude that there is co-operative-subjective and invisible life. Movement as a symbol for the eye; it denotes that something has been felt, willed, thought. The danger of directly questioning the subject _concerning_ the subject, and all spiritual self-reflection, consists in this, that it might be a necessary condition of its activity to interpret itself _erroneously._ That is why we appeal to the body and lay the evidence of sharpened senses aside: or we try and see whether the subjects themselves cannot enter into communication with us.