f. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and
despises it.

And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order
that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a
ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew.

Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque,
would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there
is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say
scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si
muove!_

_Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant
would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry
of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.
And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there
is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and
the theology of the theologians.

Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel
with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are
living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of
Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the
fool" (ii. 16).

Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the
customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that
is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What
can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?--

_Coda vez que considero
que me tengo de morir,
tiendo la capa en el suelo
y no me harto de dormir._[60]

But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a
dream.

Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current
usage, the expression "It's a question of passing the time," or "killing
the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is
something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing
the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude--and that is,
gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude. The
truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious,
passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.

One of our younger novelists, Ramon Perez de Ayala, in his recent novel,
_La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap,
and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circum