A negative achievement, it will be said.  But what is that?  What is negative? what is positive?  At what point in time—­a line always continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future—­does the zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the negative?  Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues—­and all of them rogues—­has been the country most slandered by history precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation.  And because its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public forum, into the world’s vanity fair, and publishing its own justification.

Let us leave on one side Spain’s eight centuries of warfare against the Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies—­for this was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco da Gama—­let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it is not a little thing.  Is it not a cultural achievement to have created a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten, as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves?  Apart from all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?  Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.

But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas, and man is only Culture’s instrument.  Man for the idea, and not the idea for man; the substance for the shadow.  The end of man is to create science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, Amor y Pedagogia.  Man, apparently, is not even an idea.  And at the end of all, the human race will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries—­whole woods rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in them—­museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to bequeath them—­to whom?  For God will surely not accept them.

That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture, which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort—­and this with great vociferation, vociferating silence—­of extolling prudence, exactitude, moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked them most.  Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of literature, some more and some less.  And so it befell that that arch-Spaniard Joaquin Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and, while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to—­conquer Africa!  And I myself uttered the cry, “Down with Don Quixote!” and from this blasphemy, which meant the very opposite of what it said—­such was the fashion of the hour—­sprang my Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho and my cult of Quixotism as the national religion.