rica! And I myself
uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which
meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the
hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism
as the national religion.

I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the
Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what
was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to
me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he
actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover
in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and
under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down
our philosophy in it.

For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the
Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our
life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in
philosophical systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as much
philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel? The poetry of
Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueno_, the
_Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept
of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for
this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the
nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist,
technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period
essentially materialist and pessimist.

Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within
itself an implicit philosophy.

A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek
language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors;
scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages
wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in
Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and
in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all
philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation
(_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the
senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly
elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by
means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiri