It must be claimed for Unamuno that he is, in the truest sense of the word, a great humanist. He himself distinguishes between the true humanism, which he calls the humanism of man, and the humanism which is concerned rather with “the things of man”--in other words, with culture as it is generally understood. Towards the latter his attitude is tinctured with suspicion. For him there is an element of the inhumane in the cult of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and in the cult of science as a mere cataloguing of existence. Culture must have reference to character and perhaps its definition as “the best that is known and has been thought in the world” he would feel to be incomplete without the addition of “the best that has been felt and done.” But mere knowledge and classification of the movements of the human mind or the achievements of human energy do not necessarily of themselves touch the heart to finer issues. The most urgent need, at any rate as he sees it in his own country, is not so much for quickened intelligence as for reawakened capacity for feeling and enthusiasm. By itself sceptical enlightenment tends to paralyse action and the soil of a chilly intellectualism is not the most fertile for the burgeoning of that seed of faith from which all fruitful human endeavour must ultimately spring. Unamuno seeks to generate warmth of feeling as the necessary condition of high achievement. “Warmth, warmth, more warmth,” he cries, “for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.” Culture, therefore, as he understands and counsels it, is not a dry light but an ardent flame and its purpose is to kindle “the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest despair.” Unamuno has always protested passionately against any attempt to affix a label to him. If a definition of himself is demanded of him, he replies that he is “a man of contradiction and strife.” The contradictions of which he is the synthesis are those of the Catholic and the agnostic, the mystic and the realist, the vitalist and the rationalist, the contemplative and the man of action, the contradictions inherent in the man who finds consolation in despair and peace in conflict. But if he himself is not to be circumscribed within the narrow limits of a definition, perhaps the scope of his aim and achievement may be most succinctly resumed in that description which Giordano Bruno gave of himself, _dormitantium animarum excubitor_--an awakener of sleeping souls. THE SPIRIT OF CASTILE