whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will.  Granted, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will—­namely, the Will to Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition—­it is one problem—­ could also be found therein:  one would thus have acquired the right to define all active force unequivocally as will to power.  The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its “intelligible character”—­it would simply be “Will to Power,” and nothing else.

37.  “What?  Does not that mean in popular language:  God is disproved, but not the devil?”—­On the contrary!  On the contrary, my friends!  And who the devil also compels you to speak popularly!

38.  As happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately, until the text has disappeared under the interpretation), so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make its aspect endurable.—­Or rather, has not this already happened?  Have not we ourselves been—­that “noble posterity”?  And, in so far as we now comprehend this, is it not—­thereby already past?

39.  Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous—­excepting, perhaps, the amiable “Idealists,” who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their pond.  Happiness and virtue are no arguments.  It is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter-arguments.  A thing could be true, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it—­so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of “truth” it could endure—­or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified.  But there is no doubt that for the discovery of certain portions of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more favourably situated and have a greater likelihood of success; not to speak of the wicked who are happy—­a species about whom moralists are silent.  Perhaps severity and craft are more favourable conditions for