For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul.  And what we long for and have need of is soul—­soul of bulk and substance.

But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us about Culture and Europe.

Europe!  This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical category.  Who can say to-day—­in Spain, at any rate—­what Europe is?  I only know that it is a shibboleth (vide my Tres Ensayos).  And when I proceed to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its periphery remains outside of it—­Spain, of course, and also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia—­and hence it is reduced to the central portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.

All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of internecine war, were twin-brothers.  The Italians of the Renaissance were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head, regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella.  But this barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was also the antagonist of the common enemy.  All this, I say, is due to the Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.

When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth’s motion to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he considered his treatise “as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire your highness to receive it.”  And at other times he calls it a “chimera” or a “mathematical caprice.”  And in the same way in these essays, for fear also—­why not confess it?—­of the Inquisition, of the modern, the scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me.  And I say with Galileo, Eppur si muove! But is it only because of this fear?  Ah, no! for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European—­and such am I, whether I will or not—­carries within him.  There is a more terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man contemplates his own self.  It is my reason that laughs at my faith and despises it.

And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a ridicule which perhaps—­who knows?—­he never knew.