In paragraphs 19 and 20, NietzSche discusses the “error of imaginary causes.” Are there instances in your own life when you made the mistake of assigning imaginary causes to effects you observed? If your examples have a moral implication, be sure to clarify the nature of the error and decide whether or not your experience helps to reinforce Nietz sche’s argument or weaken it.

PARAGRAPHS 19 & 20:The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: expost facto, a cause is slipped under a par tic u lar sensation (for example, one following a far- off cannon shot) — often a whole little novel in which the dreamer turns up as the protagonist. The sensation endures meanwhile in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the causal instinct permits it to step into the foreground — now no longer as a chance occurrence, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears in a causal mode, in an apparent reversal of time. What is really later, the motivation, is experienced first — often with a hundred details which pass like lightning — and the shot follows. What has happened? The representations which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its causes.

In fact, we do thenovel in which the dreamer turns up as the protagonist. The sensation endures meanwhile, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympathicus14 — excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that — for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only — become conscious of it only — when we have furnished some kind of motivation. 

Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them — not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such repre sen ta tions, such accompanying conscious pro cesses, are the causes, is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual ac cep tance of a par tic u lar causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause — even precludes it.

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