The belief that the world which ought to be, is, really exists, is a belief proper to the unfruitful, who do not wish to create a world as it should be. They take it for granted, they seek for means and ways of attaining to it. "The will to truth"—is the impotence of the will to create.
| To recognise that something | } | Antagonism in |
| is thus or thus: | } | the degrees of |
| To act so that something will | } | energy in |
| be thus or thus: | } | various natures. |
The fiction of a world which corresponds to our desires; psychological artifices and interpretations calculated to associate all that we honour and regard as pleasant, with this real world.
"The will to truth" at this stage is essentially the art of interpretation: to which also belongs that interpretation which still possesses strength.
The same species of men, grown one degree poorer, no longer possessed of the power to interpret and to create fictions, produces the Nihilists. A Nihilist is the man who says of the world as it is, that it ought not to exist, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist. According to this, existence (action, suffering, willing, and feeling) has no sense: the pathos of the "in vain" is the Nihilist's pathos—and as pathos it is moreover an inconsistency on the part of the Nihilist.
He who is not able to introduce his will into things, the man without either will or energy, at least invests them with some meaning, i.e. he believes that a will is already in them.
The degree of a man's will-power may be measured from the extent to which he can dispense with the meaning in things, from the extent to which he is able to endure a world without meaning: because he himself arranges a small portion of it.
The philosophical objective view of things may thus be a sign of poverty both of will and of energy. For energy organises what is closest and next; the "scientists," whose only desire is to ascertain what exists, are such as cannot arrange things as they ought to be.
The artists, an intermediary species, they at least set up a symbol of what should exist,—they are productive inasmuch as they actually alter and transform; not like the scientists, who leave everything as it is.