But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas,
and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea
for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God
in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man,
apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race
will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods
rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in
them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to
bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them.
That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture,
which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the
pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great
vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude,
moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social
virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked
them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of
literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that
arch-Spaniard Joaquin Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever
had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and,
while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a
sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself
uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which
meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the
hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism
as the national religion.
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