uilds up his theory of life. But is it a theory?
Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual dignity. He knows too
well that in the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the
leading part and repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical
objections might be raised against this or that assumption or
self-contradiction. It is on the survival of his will to live, after all
the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for
his belief--or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads
to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal
conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to
survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for
immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe--that is,
to create God.

Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism
of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on
love. His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of whom
he truly says that his creed "can hardly be called idealism, since he
did not fight for ideas: it was spiritualism, for he fought for the
spirit." Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a
religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain--_i.e._, the
spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race--to Europe, his
Europe--_i.e._, the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which
he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically
unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is
already prophetically spelt Kultura.

This courageous work is written in a style which is the man--for
Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter. It is written
as Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and
the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can
without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and then
underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and above all asserts.
In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner of
writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The differences, and
they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of
nature. They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the
devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the
free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca.
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