the other—­to wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas.  Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew:  philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.  The wonderful family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easily enough explained.  In fact, where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—­I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions—­it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.  It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the conception of the subject is least developed) look otherwise “into the world,” and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and Mussulmans, the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.—­So much by way of rejecting Locke’s superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas.

21.  The causa SUI is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly.  The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.  If any one should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of “free will” and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of “free will”:  I mean “non-free will,” which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and effect.  One should not wrongly materialise “cause” and “effect,” as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them naturalize in thinking at present), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it “effects” its end; one should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure conceptions, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding,—­not for explanation.  In “being-in-itself” there is nothing of “casual-connection,”