An individualist.  Certainly.  And he proudly claims the title.  Nothing more refreshing in these days of hoggish communistic cant than this great voice asserting the divine, the eternal rights of the individual.  But it is not with political rights that he is concerned.  Political individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he so energetically condemns as pedantic—­that is, inhuman.  His opposition of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no less puerile socialist.  There is nothing childish about Unamuno.  His assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for society, is made on a transcendental plane.  It is not the argument of liberty against authority—­which can be easily answered on the rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and longer-living “individual” than the individual pure and simple.  It is rather the unanswerable argument of eternity against duration.  Now that argument must rest on a religious basis.  And it is on a religious basis that Unamuno founds his individualism.  Hence the true Spanish flavour of his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid and absolute, like the spirit.

Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists.  It is, on the contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses to dwell on anything less than man’s origin and destination.  We are here confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature.  All races are of course predominantly concerned with man.  But they all manifest their concern with a difference.  Man is in Spain a concrete being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man.  He is neither subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman by social laws and prejudices.  Spanish art and letters deal with concrete, tangible persons.  Now, there is no more concrete, no more tangible person for every one of us than ourself.  Unamuno is therefore right in the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly—­one might almost say always—­with his own person.  The feeling of the awareness of one’s own personality has seldom been more forcibly expressed than by Unamuno.  This is primarily due to the fact that he is himself obsessed by it.  But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also some strength from his own sense of matter and the material—­again a typically Spanish element of his character.  Thus his human beings are as much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which he admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors, as in gozarse uno la carne del alma (to enjoy the flesh of one’s own soul).