To feel oneself a man
is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the
process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only
in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man,
each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de
Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.
And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end
of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was
pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish
People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La Espana
Moderna_.[64]
And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not
permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or,
rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suarez, whose formal
subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.
Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been
metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or,
rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.
Menendez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_,
bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical 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.
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