"Pain" and "pleasure" are the most absurd _means of expressing_ judgments, which of course does not mean that the judgments which are enunciated in this way must necessarily be absurd. The elimination of all substantiation and logic, a yes or no in the reduction to a passionate desire to have or to reject, an imperative abbreviation, the utility of which is irrefutable: that is pain and pleasure. Its origin is in the central sphere of the intellect; its prerequisite is an infinitely accelerated process of perceiving, ordering, co-ordinating, calculating, concluding: pleasure and pain are always final phenomena, they are never causes. As to deciding what provokes pain and pleasure, that is a question which depends upon the _degree of power:_ the same thing, when confronted with a small quantity of power, may seem a danger and may suggest the need of speedy defence, and when confronted with the consciousness of greater power, may be a voluptuous stimulus and may be followed by a feeling of pleasure. All feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose a _measuring of collective utility_ and _collective harmfulness_: consequently a sphere where there is the willing of an object (of a condition) and the selection of the means thereto. Pleasure and pain are never "original facts." The feelings of pleasure and pain are _reactions of the will_ (emotions) in which the intellectual centre fixes the value of certain supervening changes as a collective value, and also as an introduction of contrary actions. 670. _The belief in "emotions"_--Emotions are a fabrication of the intellect, an invention of _causes_ which do not exist. All general _bodily sensations_ which we do not understand are interpreted intellectually--that is to say, a _reason_ is sought why we feel thus or thus among certain people or in certain experiences. Thus something disadvantageous dangerous, and strange is taken for granted, as if it were the cause of our being indisposed; as a matter of fact, it gets _added to_ the indisposition, so as to make our condition thinkable.--Mighty rushes of blood to the brain, accompanied by a feeling of suffocation, are _interpreted_ as anger: the people and things which provoke our anger are a means of relieving our physiological condition. Subsequently, after long habituation, certain processes and general feelings are so regularly correlated that the sight of certain processes provokes that condition of general feeling, and induces vascular engorgements, the ejection of seminal fluid, etc.: we then say that the "emotion is provoked by propinquity." _Judgments_ already inhere in pleasure and pain: stimuli become differentiated, according as to whether they increase or reduce the feeling of power.