It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought itself persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the ensemble of life, and through its ignorance of, or indifference to, the fact that there are other modes of ascertainment besides itself, forfeits its opportunity of surveying the whole without prejudice. In truth, all professors of thought--and in every Culture they have been almost the only authorized spokesmen--have taken it as self-evident that cold abstract thought is _the_ way of approach to “last things.” Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the “truth” which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which they have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is, a sort of imaginary picture which takes the place of the unknowable secrets.

For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact that his being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born subtilizer fails to grasp. The aim of thought is called “truth,” and truths are “established”--i.e., brought out of the living impalpability of the light-world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths are absolute and eternal--i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.

But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths[11] differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness, for the service of being, and not to that side of the waking-consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths. Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the _value_ of truth and knowledge--cheap and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant, who regards his whole _raison d’être_ as impugned by it. Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can only _believe_ in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage.

Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unravelled and questions answered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child’s eyes, that terrible dowry of human waking-consciousness which compels the understanding, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to probe into every deep for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?

“Shuddering awe is mankind’s noblest part.” He to whom that gift has been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect, and destroy the awe-inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge therefrom. The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to “establish,” stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has _conquered_ when it has completed the business of making rigid.

This distinction that is usually drawn between “reason” (_Vernunft_) and “understanding” (_Verstand_) is really that between the divination and flair belonging to our plant side, which merely _makes use_ of the language of eye and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to our animal side, which is _deduced from_ language. “Reason” in this sense is that which calls ideas into life, “understanding” that which finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can be imparted (_mitgeteilt_); ideas belong to the living self of the author and can only be sympathetically evoked (_mitgefühlt_). Understanding is essentially critical, reason essentially creative.[12] The latter begets the object of its activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding criticism is first practised and developed in association with ordinary sensations--it is in sensation-judgments that the child learns to comprehend and to differentiate. Then, abstracted from this connexion and henceforward busied with itself, criticism needs a substitute for the sensation-activity that had previously served as its object. And this cannot be given it but by an _already existing_ mode of thought, and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this, and not something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.

For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive man forms for himself a religious world-picture, and this is the object upon which the understanding begins to operate critically. Always science has grown up on a religion and under all the spiritual prepossessions of that religion, and always it signifies nothing more or less than an abstract melioration of these doctrines, considered as false because less abstract. Always it carries along the kernel of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem-enunciations, and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing but a critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The polarity between old and new knowledge involves the consequence that in the world of the understanding there is only the relatively correct--namely, judgments of greater convincingness than other judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon the belief that the understanding of to-day is better than that of yesterday. And that which forces us to this belief, is again, life.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of Waking-Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the world-as-nature[13] and the world as history; or of pulse and tension. The waking consciousness seeks to understand not only itself, but in addition something that is akin to itself. Though an inner voice may tell one that here all possibilities of knowledge are left behind, yet, in spite of it, fear overpersuades--everyone--and one goes on with the search, preferring even the pretence of a solution to the alternative of looking into nothingness.