the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically.”  We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they do not think or calculate—­for we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible idea—­namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who put faith above reason.  For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.

The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must endeavour to discover.

And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish philosophy in the technical sense of the word?  I will answer by asking, What is this sense?  What does philosophy mean?  Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (Was ist Philosophie? in the first volume of his Praeludien) tells us that “the history of the word ‘philosophy’ is the history of the cultural significance of science.”  He continues:  “When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge.  As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs.  And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself.”  Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs.  But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict?

Later on Windelband says:  “By philosophy in the systematic, not in the historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of universal validity (allgemeingiltigen Werten).”  But what values are there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of the soul—­or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe—­and that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the possibility of this desire?  What values are there of more universal validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another?