 This passage is not atypical. Later in the same work, he returns to the same theme concerning “[w]herever the will to power declines in any form” (A 17). In the immediately preceding work he claims that the “effects” of liberal institutions are “known well enough: they undermine the will to power” (TI IX:38). And in the immediately subsequent work (his last), Nietzsche refers to “the terrible aspects of reality (in affects, in desires, in the will to power)…” (EH IV:4), which certainly sounds as if will to power is simply one among various characteristics of reality — alongside affects and desires, rather than the essential core of them all.