excerpt from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols
The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: ex post facto, a cause is slipped under a particular sensation. […] What has happened? The representations which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its causes.
Most of our general feelings…excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that — for feeling bad or for feeling good. […] First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels sos good that one “considers it true.” The proof of pleasure (“of strength”) as the criterion of truth.
[…] That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one searches for some kind of explanation to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation — that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, the new, and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. Consequence: one kind of positing of causes predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system, and finally emerges as dominant, that is, as simply precluding other causes and explanations.