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; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof.  In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!—­one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza’s inconsistency).  It is thus, in effect, that method ordains, which must be essentially economy of principles.

14.  It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement (according to us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation; but in so far as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more—­namely, as an explanation.  It has eyes and fingers of its own, it has ocular evidence and palpableness of its own:  this operates fascinatingly, persuasively, and convincingly upon an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes—­in fact, it follows instinctively the canon of truth