Very well, then, if we are destined to end
tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we would far rather prefer
this terrible, but noble, destiny, to that which is reserved, and
perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that
_thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and
comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are
a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of
feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which
provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying
that they do not think or calculate--for we twin-brothers of the
Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry
of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible
idea--namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I
should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically
who put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who die comically,
and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of
tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.
The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must
endeavour to discover.
And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish
philosophy in the technical sense of the word? I will answer by asking,
What is this sense? What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian
of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (_Was ist
Philosophie_? in the first volume of his _Praeludien_) tells us that "the
history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural
significance of science.
Pages:
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440