And it is true that Menendez de Pelayo, whose
philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the
timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the
Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was
anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which
is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward
combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.
Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily
inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy
was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few
Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and
accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic,
and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who
believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and
who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the
second century.
But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any
actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man
of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.
There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a
Quixotic philosophy.
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