Aftereffects of the oldest religiosity. – Every thoughtless person believes that the will alone is effective; that willing is something simple, absolutely given, underivable, and intelligible in itself. When he does something, e.g. strikes something, he is convinced that it is he who is striking, and that he did the striking because he wanted to strike. He does not even notice a problem here; the feeling of will suffices for him to assume cause and effect, but also to believe that he understands their relation. He knows nothing of the mechanism of what happened and the hundredfold delicate work that has to be done to bring about the strike, or of the incapacity of the will as such to do even the slightest part of this work. The will is to him a force that works by magic: the belief in the will as the cause of effects is the belief in forces that work by magic. Now, originally man believed, wherever he saw something happen, that a will had to be the cause and that beings with a personal will had to be operating in the background – the concept of mechanics was quite foreign to him. But since man believed for immense periods of time only in persons (and not in substances, forces, things, etc.), the faith in cause and effect has become for him the fundamental faith that he uses everywhere something happens – still today instinctively and as an atavism of the oldest origin. The propositions, ‘no effect without a cause’, ‘every effect again a cause’, appear as generalizations of much narrower propositions: ‘no effecting without willing’; ‘it is possible to have an effect only on willing beings’; ‘no suffering of an effect is ever pure and without consequences, but all suffering is an agitation of the will’ (towards action, defence, revenge, retribution) – but in the prehistory of humanity the former and latter propositions were identical: the former were not generalizations of the latter, but the latter were elucidations of the former.11 With his assumption that only that which wills exists, Schopenhauer enthroned a primordial mythology; he seems never to have attempted an analysis of the will because like everyone else he believed in the simplicity and immediacy of all willing – whereas willing is actually such a well-practised mechanism that it almost escapes the observing eye. Against him I offer these propositions: first, in order for willing to come about, a representation of pleasure or displeasure is needed. Secondly, that a violent stimulus is experienced as pleasure or pain is a matter of the interpreting intellect, which, to be sure, generally works without our being conscious of it (uns unbewufit); and one and the same stimulus can be interpreted as pleasure or pain. Thirdly, only in intellectual beings do pleasure, pain, and will exist; the vast majority of organisms has nothing like it.