called an injustice to all of us who are
not Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time that Shakespeare had that
advantage and was thereby enabled to exist.

The sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the two
environments compared are really somewhat analogous, so that the
illusion of a change of roles without a change of characters may retain
some colour. It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fable
to make the first rebel against God the chief among the angels, the
spirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp.
Lucifer's fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial.
His perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting the
happiness proper to his nature. This was the maddest possible way of
rebelling against his true creator; for it is our particular finitude
that creates us and makes us be. No one, except in wilful fancy, would
envy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a Grand
Lama. An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently
leave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a
nominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace
of a change would be perceptible. But the penny that one man finds and
another misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have transmuted
each man into the other. So adventitious a circumstance seems easily
transferable without undermining that personal distinction which it had
come to embitter. Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in such
suppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind an
accident, for instance, as sex is also adventitious and ideally
transferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could have
exchanged genders.

What extends these invidious comparisons beyond all tolerable bounds is
the generic and vague nature proper to language and its terms. The first
personal pronoun "I" is a concept so thoroughly universal that it can
accompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate an
individual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which he
shares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make up
his life. Each man's memory embraces a certain field, and if the
landscape open to his vision is sad and hateful he naturally wishes it
to shift and become like that paradise in which, as he fancies, other
men dwell. A legitimate rebellion against evil in his own