h, of which all the rest,
dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus
logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the
word, and not upon the brute perception.

And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that
it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's
novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition
that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he
believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is
made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess,
simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate,
and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give
a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a
moment all the consequences will follow."

Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the
beginning.

Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the
solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as
absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the
methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man
is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the
process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only
in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man,
each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de
Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.

And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end
of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was
pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish
People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La Espana
Moderna_.[64]

And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not
permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or,
rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suarez, whose formal
subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.

Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been
metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or,
rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.

Menendez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_,
bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphy