Physiologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to _discharge_ its strength: "_self-preservation" _ is only one of the results thereof.--Let us beware of _superfluous_ teleological principles!--one of which is the whole concept of "self-preservation."[4] [Footnote 4: See _Beyond Good and Evil,_ in this edition, Aph. 13.] 651. The most-fundamental--and most primeval activity of a protoplasm cannot be ascribed to a will to self-preservation, for it absorbs an amount of material which is absurdly out of proportion with the needs of its preservation: and what is more, it does _not_ "preserve itself" in the process, but actually falls to _pieces...._ The instinct which rules here, must account for this total absence in the organism of a desire to preserve itself: hunger is already an interpretation based upon the observation of a more or less complex organism (hunger is a specialised and later form of the instinct; it is an expression of the system of divided labour, in the service of a higher instinct which rules the whole). 652. It is just as impossible to regard _hunger_ as the _primum mobile,_ as it is to take self-preservation to be so. Hunger, considered as the result of insufficient nourishment, means hunger as the result of a will to power _which can no longer dominate_ It is not a question of replacing a loss, it is only later on, as the result of the division of labour, when the Will to Power has discovered other and quite different ways of gratifying itself, that the appropriating lust of the organism is _reduced_ to hunger--to the need of replacing what has been lost. 653. We can but laugh at the false "_Altruism_" of biologists: propagation among the amœbæ appears as a process of jetsam, as an advantage to them. It is an excretion of useless matter. 654. The division of a protoplasm into two takes place when its power is no longer sufficient to subjugate the matter it has appropriated: procreation is the result of impotence. In the cases in which the males seek the females and become one with them, procreation is the result of hunger. 655. The weaker vessel is driven to the stronger from a need of nourishment; it desires to get under it, if possible to become _one_ with it. The stronger, on the contrary, defends itself from others; it refuses to perish in this way; it prefers rather to split itself into two or more parts in the process of growing. One may conclude that the greater the urgency seems to become one with something else, the more weakness in some form is present. The greater the tendency to variety, difference, inner decay, the more strength is actually to hand. The instinct to cleave to something, and the instinct to repel something, are in the inorganic as in the organic world, the uniting bond. The whole distinction is a piece of hasty judgment.