to us
about Culture and Europe.

Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical
significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a
kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any
rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my
_Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our
Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its
periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England,
Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central
portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.

All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of
internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance
were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head,
regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his
driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this
barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was
also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these
two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of
science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to
its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.

When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke
of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher
authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he
considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire
your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera"
or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for
fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the
scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical
caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with
Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no!
for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the
Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and
such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more
terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man
contemplates his own sel