He is solely
concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his
life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does
answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human
being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into ourselves
that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk which can
only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching
within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which
cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the inner
contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy
and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here
the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn
away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that
passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the
slightest thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would
appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is precisely
because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of his own life that he
thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every argument which he finds
in his mind--his own mind, a part of his life--against the possibility
of life after death; but it is also because he feels that, despite such
conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres, that he refuses to
his intellect the power to kill his faith.
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