It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing something addressed to and concerned with this public.  For just as a new friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself, as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which, if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is with a new public.  Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish spirit—­my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish—­unexplored by myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples of English speech.

And now, no more.

God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which
I desire for myself.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.

SALAMANCA,
April, 1921.

* * * * *

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text, are distinguished by his initials.

I

THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE

Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright.  And I would rather say, Nullum hominem a me alienum puto:  I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger.  For to me the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitas, humanity.  Neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive—­man.  The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies—­above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific.  He is the legendary featherless biped, the zoon politikhon of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the homo economicus of the Manchester school, the homo sapiens of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal.  A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea.  That is to say, a no-man.

The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone—­I, you, reader of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.

And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not.

In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts.  The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place.  And yet it is precisely this inner biography that explains for us most things.