Beyond Good and Evil | Page 9

most earnest
longings of the naturally pious-inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to the
whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness,
notwithstanding that it disguised itself so boldly, in hoary and senile conceptions), than to
take it seriously, or even treat it with moral indignation. Enough, however--the world
grew older, and the dream vanished. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads,
and they still rub them today. People had been dreaming, and first and foremost--old Kant.
"By means of a means (faculty)"--he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that--an
answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does
opium induce sleep? "By means of a means (faculty), "namely the virtus dormitiva,
replies the doctor in Moliere,
Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.
But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian
question, "How are synthetic judgments a PRIORI possible?" by another question, "Why
is belief in such judgments necessary?"--in effect, it is high time that we should
understand that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the
preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still might naturally be false
judgments! Or, more plainly spoken, and roughly and readily--synthetic judgments a
priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are
nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as
plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of life. And finally,
to call to mind the enormous influence which "German philosophy"--I hope you
understand its right to inverted commas (goosefeet)?--has exercised throughout the whole
of Europe, there is no doubt that a certain VIRTUS DORMITIVA had a share in it;
thanks to German philosophy, it was a delight to the noble idlers, the virtuous, the
mystics, the artiste, the three-fourths Christians, and the political obscurantists of all
nations, to find an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which overflowed from
the last century into this, in short--"sensus assoupire." . . .
12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best- refuted theories that have been
advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly
as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an
abbreviation of the means of expression)-- thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and
the Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of
ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the
senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in
the last thing that "stood fast" of the earth--the belief in "substance," in "matter," in the
earth-residuum, and particle- atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has
hitherto been gained on earth. One must, however, go still further, and also declare war,
relentless war to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which still lead a
dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated
"metaphysical requirements": one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that
other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the
SOUL- ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which

regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an
atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all
necessary to get rid of "the soul" thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most
venerated hypotheses--as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can
hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new
acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal
soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the instincts
and passions," want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW
psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished
with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were,
thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust--it is possible that the older
psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he
finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT--and, who knows? perhaps
to DISCOVER the new.
13. Psychologists 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--life itself is WILL TO POWER;