Nietzsche does not think that pleasure and pain cause anything, being simply accompaniments of processes that would go on without them (ibid., § 478). In accordance with this general view of the nature and necessity of pain, is a remark to the effect that the simple unsatisfaction of our impulses (hunger, sex, or the impulse to move) contains nothing to lower our pitch—rather works to stimulate us (ibid.', §§ 697, 702). There are two kinds of pain, one that acts as a stimulus to the sense of power, another that arises after the expenditure of power; and to these correspond two kinds of pleasure, one such as we have in going to sleep in a state of exhaustion, the other the pleasure of victory (ibid., § 703).
gg Nietzsche even speaks of a "thinking" [i.e., the equivalent of our thinking] in the pre-organic world and calls it an enforcing of forms there, as in the case of the crystal. In our thinking the essential thing is the putting of new material into old schemata (= Procrustes bed) (Will to Power', § 499).
hh Cf. Nietzsche's own statement: "To become artist (creating), saint (loving), and philosopher (knowing) in one person—my practical aim" (Werke, XII, 213, § 448). The passage is perhaps reminiscent of his early aspiration, but this changed in form more than in substance. He says, indeed, in Ecce Homo (preface, § 2) that he is a disciple of Dionysus and would rather be a satyr than a saint, but he here means by "saint" one who turns his back on life. Even asceticism Nietzsche did not altogether discountenance, but the sort he favors was in the interests of life, not against it. Those whom he regards as the supreme type of men practise this kind of asceticism and find their pleasure in it (The Antichristian, § 57). In speaking of the future "lords of the earth" (who are to replace God for men and win the unconditional confidence of the ruled) he emphasizes first "their new sanctity (Heiligkeit), their renunciation of happiness and comfort" (Werke, pocket ed., VII, 486, § 36). Purity and renunciation (of some kind) are the essential elements in the concept of the saint (cf. the sympathetic portrayal of the saint as representing the highest instinct of purity in Beyond Good and Evil, § 271, also Genealogy etc., I, § 6; and the description of the redemptive man of great love and great contempt, who must sometime come, at the close of § 24 of Genealogy etc., II).
ii With this view of will to power as the essence of the world, accident may be looked at from a new point of view. It is true that each center of power lives and acts in the midst of a realm of the accidental; but this accident itself turns out to be the action of other centers of power. Accident really means then no more than that my will to power is crossed by somebody else's will to power. It would seem to follow then that if the power of the world could be organized, accident would disappear. Nietzsche does not draw the conclusion, and perhaps would have regarded such a consummation undesirable; but the conclusion seems inevitable.
CHAPTER XVI
a In another way the variety and freedom of individual opinion is, to Nietzsche, an advantage (cf. the tone of Werke, XI, 196, § 102; 371-2, § 566). The greater the range of difference, the more likelihood of finding at last a view that may unite mankind again (cf. the striking language with which he describes the competition of all egos to find the thought that will stand over mankind as its star, Werke, XII, 360, § 679).
b Fouillée remarks that Guyau felt the same as Nietzsche as to the need of a critique of morality, and that he himself had criticised Kant on this score (in his Critiques des systèmes de morale contemporaine,
