And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe.  The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was pointed out by Martin A.S.  Hume in a passage in The Spanish People,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in La Espana Moderna.[64]

And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical—­or, rather, metaphysical—­systems.  And this in spite of Suarez, whose formal subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.

Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists—­or, rather, humanists—­in the most comprehensive sense of the term.

Menendez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (Estetica, bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism, but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from empirical theories.  For this reason Croce considers that his work (referring to his Historia de las ideas esteticas de Espana) suffers from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its author, Menendez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of the Renaissance.  And it is true that Menendez de Pelayo, whose philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the Catalan spirit—­that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which is so well exemplified in Balmes—­always shunned all strenuous inward combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.

Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and accent.  His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic, and there are echoes of him in Tertullian—­Spanish, too, at heart—­who believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the second century.

But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man of action, who is more real than all the philosophers—­Don Quixote.  There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy.  May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was, in its essence, none other than this?  What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?