and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy their own vital yearnings.  This is followed by the statement of the will to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy, theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete, “flesh and bones” character of the immortality which men desire is reaffirmed.  The Catholic position is then explained as the vital attitude in the matter, summed up in Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum, and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined.  Thus Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock:  his reason can rise no higher than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith, exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable.  From the bottom of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life.  But is it a theory?  Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual dignity.  He knows too well that in the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the leading part and repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical objections might be raised against this or that assumption or self-contradiction.  It is on the survival of his will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for his belief—­or rather for his effort to believe.  Self-compassion leads to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to survive.  So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe—­that is, to create God.

Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on love.  His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of whom he truly says that his creed “can hardly be called idealism, since he did not fight for ideas:  it was spiritualism, for he fought for the spirit.”  Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain—­i.e., the spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race—­to Europe, his Europe—­i.e., the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is already prophetically spelt Kultura.

This courageous work is written in a style which is the man—­for Buffon’s saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter.  It is written as Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and then underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and