sical idealism,
but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from
empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work
(referring to his _Historia de las ideas esteticas de Espana_) suffers
from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its
author, Menendez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish
humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he
called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other
reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of
the Renaissance. And it is true that Menendez de Pelayo, whose
philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the
timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the
Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was
anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which
is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward
combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.

Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily
inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy
was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few
Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and
accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic,
and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who
believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and
who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the
second century.

But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any
actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man
of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.
There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a
Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the
Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in
the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was,
in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John
of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?

And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he
did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for
th