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What is ultimately "useful"? It is necessary to ask, "Useful for what"?

For instance, that which promotes the lasting powers of the individual might be unfavourable to his strength or his beauty; that which preserves him might at the same time fix him and keep him stable throughout development. On the other hand, a deficiency, a state of degeneration, may be of the greatest possible use, inasmuch as it acts as a stimulus to other organs. In the same way,[Pg 127] a state of need may be a condition of existence, inasmuch as it reduces an individual to that modicum of means which, though it keeps him together, does not allow him to squander his strength.—The individual himself is the struggle of parts (for nourishment, space, etc.): his development involves the triumph, the predominance, of isolated parts; the wasting away, or the "development into organs," of other parts.

The influence of "environment" is nonsensically overrated in Darwin, the essential factor in the process of life is precisely the tremendous inner power to shape and to create forms, which merely uses, exploits "environment."

The new forms built up by this inner power are not produced with a view to any end; but, in the struggle between the parts, a new form does not exist long without becoming related to some kind of semi-utility, and, according to its use, develops itself ever more and more perfectly.

648.

"Utility" in respect of the acceleration of the speed of evolution, is a different kind of "utility" from that which is understood to mean the greatest possible stability and staying power of the evolved creature.

649.

"Useful" in the sense of Darwinian biology means: that which favours a thing in its struggle with others. But in my opinion the feeling of[Pg 128] being surcharged, the feeling accompanying an increase in strength, quite apart from the utility of the struggle, is the actual progress: from these feelings the will to war is first derived.

650.

Physiologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength: "self-preservation" is only one of the results thereof.—Let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!—one of which is the whole concept of "self-preservation."[4]

651.

The most-fundamental—and most primeval activity of a protoplasm cannot be ascribed to a will to self-preservation, for it absorbs an amount of material which is absurdly out of proportion with the needs of its preservation: and what is more, it does not "preserve itself" in the process, but actually falls to pieces.... The instinct which rules here, must account for this total absence in the organism of a desire to preserve itself: hunger is already an interpretation based upon the observation of a more or less complex organism (hunger is a specialised and later form of the instinct; it is an expression of the system of divided labour, in the service of a higher instinct which rules the whole).

[Pg 129]

652.

It is just as impossible to regard hunger as the primum mobile, as it is to take self-preservation to be so. Hunger, considered as the result of insufficient nourishment, means hunger as the result of a will to power which can no longer dominate It is not a question of replacing a loss, it is only later on, as the result of the division of labour, when the Will to Power has discovered other and quite different ways of gratifying itself, that the appropriating lust of the organism is reduced to hunger—to the need of replacing what has been lost.

653.

We can but laugh at the false "Altruism" of biologists: propagation among the amb appears as a process of jetsam, as an advantage to them. It is an excretion of useless matter.

654.

The division of a protoplasm into two takes place when its power is no longer sufficient to subjugate the matter it has appropriated: procreation is the result of impotence.

In the cases in which the males seek the females and become one with them, procreation is the result of hunger.

655.

The weaker vessel is driven to the stronger from a need of nourishment; it desires to get under it,[Pg 130] if possible to become one with it. The stronger, on the contrary, defends itself from others; it refuses to perish in this way; it prefers rather to split itself into two or more parts in the process of growing. One may conclude that the greater the urgency seems to become one with something else, the more weakness in some form is present. The greater the tendency to variety, difference, inner decay, the more strength is actually to hand.

The instinct to cleave to something, and the instinct to repel something, are in the inorganic as in the organic world, the uniting bond. The whole distinction is a piece of hasty judgment.

The will to power in every combination of forces, defending itself against the stronger and coming down unmercifully upon the weaker, is more correct.

N. B. All processes may be regarded as "beings".

656.

The will to power can manifest itself only against obstacles; it therefore goes in search of what resists it—this is the primitive tendency of the protoplasm when it extends its pseudopodia and feels about it. The act of appropriation and assimilation is, above all, the result of a desire to overpower, a process of forming, of additional building and rebuilding, until at last the subjected creature has become completely a part of the superior creature's sphere of power, and has increased the latter.—If this process of incorporation does not succeed, then the whole organism falls to pieces; and the separation occurs as the result of the will to power: in order to prevent the escape of that[Pg 131] which has been subjected, the will to power falls into two wills (under some circumstances without even abandoning completely its relation to the two).

"Hunger" is only a more narrow adaptation, once the fundamental instinct of power has won power of a more abstract kind.

657.

What is "passive"?

To be hindered in the outward movement of grasping: it is thus an act of resistance and reaction.

What is "active"?

To stretch out for power.

"Nutrition"...

Is only a derived phenomenon; the primitive form of it was the will to stuff everything inside one's own skin.

"Procreation"...

Only derived; originally, in those cases In which one will was unable to organise the collective mass it had appropriated, an opposing will came into power, which undertook to effect the separation and establish a new centre of organisation, after a struggle with the original will.

[Pg 132]