iversal and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned
only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are concerned also and above
all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those
norms do not secure for us. That science of economy which is called
political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of
satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational,
beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral--a business economically good may be
a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul--and the
supreme human _need_ is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for
ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation. And if the Catholic
eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus
Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each
part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole
Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And
this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical
principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle. And
with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism.
_If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or
hedonistically good; if not, it is bad_. And the meaning which pessimism
and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical
sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense. Good is that which satisfies
our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it.

Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a
reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay in this philosophy,
with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I
have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the
fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of
the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic
than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has
ennobled the pain of being operated upon.

And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy,
perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who
discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it
is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of
the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our
Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its bei