Gazing at man, however, no longer through the eyes of the serpent, shall we not be bound to find, if we look _high_ enough, distinction, superiority, inferiority, valuation? The dogma of equality is itself a device to evade valuation. For valuation is difficult, and demands generosity for its exercise. To recognize that one is greater than you, and cheerfully to acknowledge it; to see that another is less than you, and to treat the inferiority as a trifling thing, that is difficult, that requires generosity. But one who believes in inequality will always be looking for greatness in others; his eye, habituated to the contemplation of lofty things, will become subtle in the detection of concealed nobility; while to the ignoble he will give only a glance--and is it not good, where one may not help, to pass on the other side? The egalitarians will cry that it is ungenerous to believe that some men are vile; but it is a strange generosity which would persuade us with them that all men are vile. Let us be frank. To those who believe in the future, inequality is a holy thing; their pledge that greatness shall not disappear from the earth; the rainbow assuring them that Man shall not go down beneath the vast tide of mankind. All great men are to them at once forerunners and sacrifices; the imperfect forms which the Future has shattered in trying to incarnate itself; the sublime ruins of _future_ greatness. 42 _If Men Were Equal_ If men had been equal at the beginning, they would never have risen above the savage. For in absolute equality even the concept of greatness could not have come into being. Inequality is the source of all advancement. 43 _The Fall of Man_ In very early times men must have had a deep sense of the tragicality of existence: life was then so full of pain; death, as a rule, so sudden and unforeseen, and the world generally so beset with terrors. The few who were fortunate enough to escape violent death had yet to toil incessantly to retain a footing on this unkind star. Life would, accordingly, appear to them in the most sombre tones and colours. And it was to explain this human misfortune, and not sin at all, that the whole fable of Adam and Eve and the Fall was invented. The doctrine of Original Sin was simply an interpretation which was afterwards read into the story, an interpretation, perhaps, as arbitrary as the orthodox interpretation of the Song of Songs.