of eternal popular sensualism.  What is clear, what is “explained”?  Only that which can be seen and felt—­one must pursue every problem thus far.  Obversely, however, the charm of the Platonic mode of thought, which was an aristocratic mode, consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense-evidence—­perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them:  and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses—­the mob of the senses, as Plato said.  In this overcoming of the world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there was an enjoyment different from that which the physicists of today offer us—­and likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological workers, with their principle of the “smallest possible effort,” and the greatest possible blunder.  “Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do”—­that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to perform.

15.  To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist on the fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the sense of the idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could not be causes!  Sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle.  What?  And others say even that the external world is the work of our organs?  But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs!  But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs!  It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum, if the conception causa SUI is something fundamentally absurd.  Consequently, the external world is not the work of our organs—?

16.  There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”; for instance, “I think,” or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, “I will”; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as “the thing in itself,” without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object.  I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that “immediate certainty,” as well as “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself,” involve a CONTRADICTIO in ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words!  The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself:  “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, ‘I think,’ I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: