order in its ceaseless play of change and destruction. As little can we give it a moral justification—life lives off life, immorality is an essential part of its constitution. But take it as an æsthetic phenomenon, look at it as a picture, and you may see some sense in it. Regard its creator not as a Supreme Reason or a Moral Governor, but as a supreme Artist, and you get some real insight into its make-up. For the world is a kind of play, a ceaseless producing and destroying like that of a child making and unmaking his piles of sand for the pleasure of the game, or that of an artist who creates and has ever to create anew. In some such way Heraclitus seems to have viewed the world. The Æon, the eternal child Zeus, was there at play, παὶς παὶζων. If, says Nietzsche, Heraclitus had been asked, why the fire did not remain fire, why it was now fire, now water, now earth, he could only have answered, "It is a play—don't take it too pathetically, and above all not morally!"[1] h
II
Such was one current of Nietzsche's thinking. But there was another, perhaps at the start simply running alongside of it, but later becoming the main stream. This was in the direction of a renunciation of metaphysics altogether. The turning-point for Nietzsche was as to whether there was actually first-hand knowledge of the will. Schopenhauer had said that while in general we know things only as they appear, we know the will as it is (or at least as mediated through the mere forms of space and time)—know it immediately, by direct self-feeling. But Nietzsche becomes more and more dubious on this point. He asks whether it is not mere ideas, pictures (Vorstellungen), which we have here as everywhere else. He thinks that when we look closely within us, we realize that the life of our impulses, the play of our feelings, affects, acts of will, is known to us only through pictures which we form of them, not in their own nature.[2] He hesitates when he comes to pain, but he concludes that here too we have only an image.[3] i Hence we have direct knowledge of reality nowhere. Schopenhauer's
