12

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise ; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will look for error in those very places where the life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of “ Subject ” and “ Object ”⁠—errors, nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one’s own ego, to deny to oneself one’s own “reality”⁠—what a triumph! and here already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason