477.
I am convinced of the phenomenalism of the inner world also: everything that reaches our consciousness is utterly and completely adjusted, simplified, schematised, interpreted, the actual process of inner "perception," the relation of causes between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, is absolutely concealed from us, and may be purely imaginary. This "inner world of appearance" is treated with precisely the same forms and procedures as the "outer" world. We never come across a single "fact": pleasure and pain are more recently evolved intellectual phenomena....
Causality evades us; to assume the existence of an immediate causal relation between thoughts, as Logic does, is the result of the coarsest and most clumsy observation. There are all sorts of passions that may intervene between two thoughts: but the interaction is too rapid—that is why we fail to recognise them, that is why we actually deny their existence....
"Thinking," as the epistemologists understand \r it, never takes place at all: it is an absolutely gratuitous fabrication, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and by eliminating all the rest—an artificial adjustment for the purpose of the understanding....
The "mind," something that thinks: at times, even, "the mind absolute and pure"—this concept is an evolved and second result of false introspection, which believes in "thinking": in the first place an act is imagined here which does not really occur at all, i.e. "thinking"; and, secondly, a subject-substratum is imagined in which every process of this thinking has its origin, and nothing else—that is to say, both the action and the agent are fanciful.
478.
Phenomenalism must not be sought in the wrong quarter: nothing is more phenomenal, or, to be more precise, nothing is so much deception, as this inner world, which we observe with the "inner sense."
Our belief that the will is a cause was so great, that, according to our personal experiences in general, we projected a cause into all phenomena (i.e. a certain motive is posited as the cause of all phenomena).
We believe that the thoughts which follow one upon the other in our minds are linked by some sort of causal relation: the logician, more especially, who actually speaks of a host of facts which have never once been seen in reality, has grown accustomed to the prejudice that thoughts are the cause of thoughts.