ng neither a science,
nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to
say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I
must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical
work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which
can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not
some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a
product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of
the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and
not in texts that sleep?

The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression
of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don
Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as
scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as
our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be
found the explanation of what is usually said about us--namely, that we
are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_--or, in other words, that we
refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either
to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to
morality or ethics.

"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by
more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing
will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been
accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! And what
then?

Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the
waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the
ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills;
but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although
his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the
future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at
home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a
creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is
a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as
ever, is towards the future, and he who marches is getting there, even
though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the
better way!...

I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, an