An essay in this philosophy,
with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I
have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the
fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of
the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic
than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has
ennobled the pain of being operated upon.
And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy,
perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who
discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it
is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of
the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our
Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science,
nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to
say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I
must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical
work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which
can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not
some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a
product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of
the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and
not in texts that sleep?
The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression
of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don
Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as
scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as
our religious faith affirms it to be.
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