In becoming the central value of its secular and religious life, freedom constituted the tragic, generative core of Western culture, the germ of its genius and all its grandeur, and the source of much of its perfidy and its crimes against humanity. On both the secular and religious levels, its separate elements remained yoked in continuous, creative tension within themselves, and with each other, each at once good and evil, bearing the dread mark of its birth and the glow of its possibilities. At its best, the valorization of personal liberty is the noblest achievement of Western civilization. That people are free to do as they please within limits set only by the personal freedom of others; that legally all persons are equal before the law; that philosophically the individual's separate existence is inviolable; that psychologically the ultimate human condition is to be liberated from all internal and external constraints in one's desire to realize one's self; and that spiritually the son of God made himself incarnate, then gave his life in order to redeem mankind from spiritual thralldom and to make people free and equal before God—all add up to a value complex that not only is unparalleled in any other culture but, in its profundity and power, is superior to any other single complex of values conceived by mankind. Individually liberating, socially energizing, and culturally generative, freedom is undeniably the source of Western intellectual mastery, the engine of its extraordinary creativity, and the open secret of the triumph of Western culture, in one form or another, over the other cultures of mankind. The facts that, today, almost all peoples embrace the ideal of personal freedom, whatever their actual practice, and that many have come to define the value as instinctively human in order to deny its quintessentially Western origins are telling testimony to its overpowering appeal and inherent goodness.