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If we assume that nothing is "given" as real other than our world of desires and passions and that we cannot access from above or below any "reality" other than the direct reality of our drives - for thinking is only a relationship of these drives to each other -: are we not allowed to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given is not a sufficient basis also for understanding the so-called mechanical (or "material") world on the basis of things like this given. I don’t mean to understand it as an illusion, an "appearance," an "idea" (in the sense of Berkeley⁶ and Schopenhauer), but as having the same degree of reality as our affects themselves have - as a more primitive form of the world of affects in which everything is still combined in a powerful unity, something which then branches off and develops in the organic process (also, as is reasonable, gets softer and weaker -), as a form of instinctual life in which the collective organic functions, along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, and metabolism, are still synthetically bound up with one another - as an early form of life? In the end making this attempt is not only permitted but is also demanded by the conscience of the method. Not to assume various forms of causality as long as the attempt to manage with a single one has been pushed to its furthest limit (- all the way to nonsense, if I may say so): that is one moral of the method which people nowadays may not evade; - as a mathematician would say, it is a consequence "of its definition." In the end the question is whether we acknowledge the will as something really efficient, whether we believe in the causal properties of the will. If we do - and basically our faith in this is simply our faith in causality itself - then we must make the attempt to set up hypothetically the causality of the will as the single causality. Of course, "will" can work only on "will" - and not on "stuff" (not, for example, on "nerves"-). Briefly put, we must venture the hypothesis whether in general, wherever we recognize "effects," will is not working on will - and whether every mechanical event, to the extent that a force is active in it, is not force of will, an effect of the will. - Suppose finally that we were to succeed in explaining our entire instinctual life as a development and branching off of a single fundamental form of the will - that is, of the will to power, as my principle asserts - and suppose we could trace back all organic functions to this will to power and also locate in it the solution to the problem of reproduction and nourishment - that is one problem - then in so doing we would have earned the right to designate all efficient force unambiguously as will to power. Seen from inside, the world defined and described according to its "intelligible character" would be simply "will to power" and nothing else.-