In prison.—My eye, however strong and weak it may be, only encompasses a certain distance, and within this distance I move and live; this horizontal line is my immediate greater and lesser fate, from which I cannot escape. Thus round every being a concentric circle is drawn, which has a centre and which is peculiar to him. In a similar way our ear encloses us in a small space, and so does our touch. By these horizons, wherein our senses are confined as in prison-walls, we measure the world, calling one thing near and another far off, one thing large and another small, one thing hard and another soft: this measuring we call feeling—it is all, in itself, an error! According to the number of experiences and excitements which we may possibly experience during a certain period, we value our lives as short or long, poor or rich, full or void: and in correspondence to the average human life we value that of all other beings—all this is an error in itself! Were our eyes a hundred times quicker with regard to our surroundings, human beings would appear enormously tall to us; nay, we might conceive senses by which mortals might be felt to be of immeasurable size. On the other hand, orligans could be imagined such as to allow whole solar systems to be viewed as if contracted and closely packed together like a single cell: and to beings of the opposite order, one cell of the human body might present itself as a solar system in motion, construction, and harmony. The habits of our senses have plunged us into the lies and deceptions of feeling: these, again, are the foundations of all our judgments and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or by-way into the real world. We spiders are caught in our own nets, and whatever we may catch in them, we cannot catch anything but what allows itself to be caught in our net.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In prison.—My eye, however strong and weak it may be, only encompasses a certain distance, and within this distance I move and live; this horizontal line is my immediate greater and lesser fate, from which I cannot escape. Thus round every being a concentric circle is drawn, which has a centre and which is peculiar to him. In a similar way our ear encloses us in a small space, and so does our touch. By these horizons, wherein our senses are confined as in prison-walls, we measure the world, calling one thing near and another far off, one thing large and another small, one thing hard and another soft: this measuring we call feeling—it is all, in itself, an error! According to the number of experiences and excitements which we may possibly experience during a certain period, we value our lives as short or long, poor or rich, full or void: and in correspondence to the average human life we value that of all other beings—all this is an error in itself! Were our eyes a hundred times quicker with regard to our surroundings, human beings would appear enormously tall to us; nay, we might conceive senses by which mortals might be felt to be of immeasurable size. On the other hand, orligans could be imagined such as to allow whole solar systems to be viewed as if contracted and closely packed together like a single cell: and to beings of the opposite order, one cell of the human body might present itself as a solar system in motion, construction, and harmony. The habits of our senses have plunged us into the lies and deceptions of feeling: these, again, are the foundations of all our judgments and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or by-way into the real world. We spiders are caught in our own nets, and whatever we may catch in them, we cannot catch anything but what allows itself to be caught in our net." in the context of "Friedrich Nietzsche, The works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1903) 105, p. 114" to mean that wisdom is timeless.