The origin of "things" is wholly the work of the idealising, thinking, willing, and feeling subject. The concept thing as well as all its attributes.--Even "the subject" is a creation of this order, a "thing" like all others: a simplification, aiming at a definition of the _power_ that fixes, invents, and thinks, as such, as distinct from all isolated fixing, inventing, and thinking. Thus a capacity defined or distinct from all other individual capacities; at bottom action conceived collectively in regard to all the action which has yet to come (action and the probability of similar action). 557. The qualities of a thing are its effects upon other "things." If one imagines other "things" to be non-existent, a thing has no qualities. That is to say; _there is nothing without other things._ That is to say; there is no "thing-in-itself." 558. The thing-in-itself is nonsense. If I think all the "relations," all the "qualities" all the "activities" of a thing, away, the thing itself does _not_ remain: for "thingness" was only _invented fancifully_ by us to meet certain logical needs--that is to say, for the purposes of definition and comprehension (in order to correlate that multitude of relations, qualities, and activities). 559. "Things which have a nature _in themselves_"--a dogmatic idea, which must be absolutely abandoned. 560. That things should have a _nature in themselves,_ quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, _is a perfectly idle hypothesis_: it would presuppose that _interpretation_ and the _act of being subjective_ are not essential, that a thing divorced from all its relations can still be a thing. Or, the other way round: the apparent _objective_ character of things; might it not be merely the result of a _difference of degree_ within the subject perceiving?--could not that which changes slowly strike us as being objective, lasting, Being, "in-itself"?--could not the objective view be only a false way of conceiving things and a contrast _within_ the perceiving subject? 561. If all unity were only unity as organisation. But the "thing" in which we believe was _invented_ only as a substratum to the various attributes. If the thing "acts," it means: we regard _all the other_ qualities which are to hand, and which are momentarily latent, as the cause accounting for the fact that one individual quality steps forward--that is to say, _we take the sum of its qualities--x--_as the cause of the quality _x_; which is obviously _quite_ absurd and imbecile! All unity is _only so_ in the form of _organisation_ and _collective action:_ in the same way as a human community is a unity--that is to say, _the reverse of_ atomic _anarchy_; thus it is a body politic, which _stands for_ one, yet _is_ not one. 562.