much by what he gives us of himself,
as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which,
if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is
with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish
spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by
myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to
cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples
of English speech.

And now, no more.

God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
I desire for myself.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.

SALAMANCA,
_April, 1921._

* * * * *

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely
supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text,
are distinguished by his initials.

I

THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE

_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the
substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of
flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and
wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the
subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the
legendary featherless biped, the _zoon politikhon_ of Aristotle,
the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the
Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the
vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.

The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.

And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.

In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosop