tion. And because
its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public
forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own
justification.

Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the
Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of
internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this
was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it
is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten,
as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from
all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses
may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.

But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas,
and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea
for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God
in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man,
apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race
will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods
rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in
them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to
bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them.

That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture,
which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the
pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great
vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude,
moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social
virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked
them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of
literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that
arch-Spaniard Joaquin Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever
had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and,
while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a
sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Af