and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of semblance—­different valeurs, as the painters say?  Why might not the world which concerns us—­be a fiction?  And to any one who suggested:  “But to a fiction belongs an originator?”—­might it not be bluntly replied:  Why?  May not this “belong” also belong to the fiction?  Is it not at length permitted to be a little ironical towards the subject, just as towards the predicate and object?  Might not the philosopher elevate himself above faith in grammar?  All respect to governesses, but is it not time that philosophy should renounce governess-faith?

35.  O Voltaire!  O humanity!  O idiocy!  There is something ticklish in “the truth,” and in the search for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely—­“il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien”—­I wager he finds nothing!

36.  Supposing that nothing else is “given” as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other “reality” but just that of our impulses—­for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another:—­are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is “given” does not suffice, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or “material”) world?  I do not mean as an illusion, a “semblance,” a “representation” (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves—­as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, which afterwards branches off and develops itself in organic processes (naturally also, refines and debilitates)—­as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter, are still synthetically united with one another—­as a primary form of life?—­In the end, it is not only permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of logical method.  Not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so):  that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays—­it follows “from its definition,” as mathematicians say.  The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as operating, whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do so—­and fundamentally our belief in this is just our belief in causality itself—­we must make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality.  “Will” can naturally only operate on “will”—­and not on “matter” (not on “nerves,” for instance):  in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever “effects” are recognized—­and