A cardinal tenet of Unamuno’s creed is the superlative value of the individual soul. It is precious because it is unique and irreplaceable: “There cannot be any other I.” In the whole world there is only one Juan López or John Smith; the particular ingredients, good, bad or indifferent, that have combined to form this unique individuality can never again reunite in precisely the same proportions to form another identical combination. This theory, or rather this sense, of the uniqueness of personality may serve as the basis for an ethic. “Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact--that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable--a practical truth.” The whole duty of man is to discover himself, to discover his own reality, to discover what is unique in himself, to bring it to the light, not to shrink from exposing it, to express it in action and to impose it upon the world. The courage of self-affirmation is the virtue which Unamuno exhorts his fellow-countrymen to achieve. He presents a symbol of it in his vision of the Tower of Monterrey that lifts itself into the wintry air above the brown roofs of his beloved Salamanca, definite in its clean-cut contours, sure in its poise and self-containment, serenely affirming its uniqueness and indestructibility. It says itself, and to say himself is the utmost that a man can say. But society, which is the necessary medium through which the individual must express himself, is a resistant medium. It seeks to impose conformity upon the individual. It resents the exceptional, the idiosyncratic. And the social canons that circumscribe the expression of the individual’s liberty of thought and conduct operate perhaps nowhere more oppressively than in Spain. They derive their sanction largely from a sentiment by no means peculiar to Spain though perhaps peculiarly rampant there, the sentiment of envy, the sense of bitterness and hostility that is evoked by any salient excellence. And the chief weapon which envy uses with which to assail the uniqueness of the individual is ridicule. The special form, therefore, of the courage of self-affirmation that is demanded of the heroic individual is the courage to confront ridicule. This courage finds its exemplary exponent in the figure of Don Quixote, whom Unamuno takes as the supreme symbol of the warfare of the individual soul. His “Commentary upon the Life of Don Quixote and Panza” is a clarion-call to his countrymen to emulate the quixotic qualities of courage and faith--faith, even though it be in illusion--the quixotic tenacity of conviction, and the quixotic contempt of the standards of worldly prudence and of the authority of common sense and the cold, mocking reason.