And the stratagem of the gods was crowned with success; but not always. There have existed at all times some men--a few--who have detected the deception. They perceive well enough woman's loveliness--more keenly, indeed than the others--but they also suspect the real state of affairs. I call them erotic natures and count myself among them. Men call them seducers, woman has no name for them--such persons are to her unnameable. These erotic natures are the truly fortunate ones. They live more luxuriously than do the very gods, for they regale themselves with food more delectable than ambrosia, and they drink what is more delicious than nectar; they eat the most seductive invention of the gods' most ingenious thought, they are ever eating dainties set for a bait--ah, incomparable delight, ah, blissful fare--they are ever eating but the dainties set for a bait; and they are never caught. All other men greedily seize and devour it, like bumpkins eating their cabbage, and are caught. Only the erotic nature fully appreciates the dainties set out for bait--he prizes them infinitely. Woman divines this, and for that reason there is a secret understanding between him and her. But he knows also that she is a bait, and that secret he keeps to himself. That nothing more marvelous, nothing more delicious, nothing more seductive, than woman can be devised, for that vouch the gods and their pressing need which heightened their powers of invention; for that vouches also the fact that they risked all, and in shaping her moved heaven and earth. I now forsake the myth. The conception "man" corresponds to his "idea." I can therefore, if necessary, think of an individual man as existing. The idea of woman, on the other hand, is so general that no one single woman is able to express it completely. She is not contemporaneous with man (and hence of less noble origin), but a later creation, though more perfect than he. Whether now the gods took some part from him whilst he slept, from fear of waking him by taking too much; or whether they bisected him and made woman out of the one half--at any rate it was man who was partitioned. Hence she is the equal of man only after this partition. She is a delusion and a snarer, but is so only afterwards, and for him who is deluded. She is finiteness incarnate; but in her first stage she is finiteness raised to the highest degree in the deceptive infinitude of all divine and human illusions. Now, the deception does not exist--one instant longer, and one is deceived.