He said that as a boy he was deeply sensible that the Spaniards treated him with contemptuous disregard for the sole reason that he was a Filipino. From the moment when he discovered this attitude of theirs he endeavored to find out what right the Spaniards and the other whites generally had to look down upon people who think as they think, study the same things they study, and have the same mental capacity they possess, simply because these people have a brown skin and stiff, straight hair. Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, the only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate species of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other races are inferior by refusing to acknowledge their capability of acquiring European culture, so that, according to the European view, the colored races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Rizal then asked himself, Are these views just? He began asking this question when he was a school-boy and at the same time began to answer it by observing his white fellow-students closely while he studied his own mental processes and emotions in order to make comparisons. He soon remarked that in school, at least, no difference could be detected between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos. There were lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and intelligent boys among the whites as well as among the Filipino scholars. Soon this study of race spurred him to exert himself to the utmost in his school studies, and a kind of race rivalry took possession of him. He was overjoyed whenever he succeeded in solving a difficult problem that baffled his white companions. But he did not regard these events as personal successes so much as triumphs of his own collective people. Thus it was in school that he first became convinced that whites go through the same intellectual operations as Filipinos and—ceteris paribus—progress in the same way and to the same extent. From this observation he came to the conclusion that whites and Filipinos have the same intellectual endowment.