part I

feel that virtue, like religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally the same thing--is the fruit of passion.

But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find the fire.

That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science, and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together.

I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of feeling.

And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known, moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.

No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.

Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh, this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes?

All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Königsberg, who, if he was not a saint, deserved to be one?

The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus: "My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his childish days. And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the subterranean source, not the irrational substratum."

How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain, while Kantism and Hegelianism did not, although the two latter systems are much more profound, morally and philosophically, than the first? Because in transplanting the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it were, the flower, the thing that is external and above ground; but this flower, or fruit if you prefer it, draws its sap from the root of the plant, and this root, which is in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the mental evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots here--more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed--it is because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his _Geschichte des Pietismus_, has specifically Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain became followers of Krause.

And since we Spaniards are Catholic--whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not--and although some of us may claim to be rationalists or atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than culture, religiousness--if indeed they are not the same thing--is in endeavouring to formulate clearly to ourselves this subconscious, social, or popular Catholicism of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this work.

What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples is at any rate our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards and the Spanish people, as it is reflected in my consciousness, which is a Spanish consciousness, made in Spain. And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular Catholicism, is tragic. The people abhors comedy. When Pilate--the type of the refined gentleman, the superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you like--proposes to give the people comedy and mockingly presents Christ to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts "Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy. And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.

And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human souls are brother-souls.

And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and includes in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps the passion and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection. And there is a Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque religious sense--the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to develop, in this work. To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque madness does not submit to scientific logic.

And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains for me to speak of the rôle that is reserved for Don Quixote in the modern European tragi-comedy.

Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.

FOOTNOTES:

[54] Act II., Scene 4: "I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for good deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams."

[55] Act III., Scene 10: "Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does not wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose."

[56] "Se _les_ muera," y no sólo "se muera."

[57] _Trabalhos de Jesus_,