Nietzsche's argument in Twilight of the Idols is couched as a critique of causal logic; he suggests that we reason back from effects to presumed causes, then efface the act of reasoning when we suggest that the cause necessarily came first. This is the process, he suggests, by which Man has created God: as we have the grammatical habit in Indo-European languages of postulating a subject that acts on an object, we infer the presence of a Subject for Whom the universe is an object.

This is the mistake Nietzsche calls inferring a false cause; another error in his list consists of confusing cause and effect. The naive reader of hypertext assumes that the link is activated to take one to the new site of reading, the linked object. However, the link is marked in the text by the author or authors before the reader ever encounters the text; it is the existence of the linked object, the unknown Other text to which the link leads, that "causes" the existence of the link in the first place. Thus, it is not the activation of the link, but the marking in the text of such a link--and the possibility of linkage that the mark suggests--that leads to the existence of the hypertext link. Narratologically speaking, the link is thus the material inscription of desire for closure, for an impossible plenitude.