negations of this sort there may be (ουδεν εστι, η το της στερησεως ονομα, μετα αμυδρας επινοιας—_nihil est, nisi negationis nomen, cum obscura notione_.—Jul. or. 5), instead of which it would be shorter to say at once cloud-cuckoo-town (νεφελοκοκκυγια): we shall not require to serve up covered empty dishes of this kind. Finally, we shall not in this book, any more than in those which have preceded it, narrate histories and give them out as philosophy. For we are of opinion that whoever supposes that the inner nature of the world can in any way, however plausibly disguised, be _historically_ comprehended, is infinitely far from a philosophical knowledge of the world. Yet this is what is supposed whenever a “becoming,” or a “having become,” or an “about to become” enters into a theory of the nature of the world, whenever an earlier or a later has the least place in it; and in this way a beginning and an end of the world, and the path it pursues between them, is, either openly or disguisedly, both sought for and found, and the individual who philosophises even recognises his own position on that path. Such _historical philosophising_ in most cases produces a cosmogony which admits of many varieties, or else a system of emanations, a doctrine of successive disengagements from one being; or, finally, driven in despair from fruitless efforts upon these paths to the last path of all, it takes refuge in the converse doctrine of a constant becoming, springing up, arising, coming to light out of darkness, out of the hidden ground source or groundlessness, or whatever other nonsense of this sort there may be, which is most shortly disposed of with the remark that at the present moment a whole eternity, _i.e._, an endless time, has already passed, so that everything that can or ought to become must have already done so. For all such historical philosophy, whatever airs it may give itself, regards _time_ just as if Kant had never lived, as a quality of the thing-in-itself, and thus stops at that which Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing-in-itself; which Plato calls the becoming and never being, in opposition to the being and never becoming; and which, finally, is called in the Indian philosophy the web of Mâya. It is just the knowledge which belongs to the principle of sufficient reason, with which no one can penetrate to the inner nature of things, but endlessly pursues phenomena, moving without end or aim, like a squirrel in its wheel, till, tired out at last, he stops at some point or other arbitrarily chosen, and now desires to extort respect for it from others also. The genuine philosophical consideration of the world, _i.e._, the consideration that affords us a knowledge of its inner nature, and so leads us beyond the phenomenon, is precisely that method which does not concern itself with the whence, the whither, and the why of the world, but always and everywhere demands only the what; the method which considers