Just as love of death and the feeling that it is the principle of our true life ought not to lead us to a violent renunciation of life, to suicide--for life is a preparation for death, and the better the preparation, the better the thing prepared for--so neither ought love of wisdom to lead us to a renunciation of science, for that would be equivalent to mental suicide, but to an acceptance of science as a preparation, and as nothing more than a preparation, for wisdom. For my part I can say that if I had never made excursions into the fields of some of the modern European sciences, I should never have taken the delight that I have taken in our ancient African wisdom, in our popular wisdom, in what scandalizes all the Pharisees and Sadducees of intellectualism, that horrible intellectualism that poisons the soul. It is hearing hymns in praise of them that has made me view science and life with distrust, perhaps with horror, and love the wisdom of death, the meditation which, according to Spinoza, the free man, that is, the happy man, does not meditate. * * * * * A few days ago I read an article by my friend and fellow-Basque, Pío Baroja, entitled “The Sad Country,” in which he says that Spain is a sad country, just as France is a beautiful country. He opposes smiling France, with its level fertile soil, with its mild climate, with its bright transparent rivers that slide smoothly along flush with their banks, to our peninsula, full of stones, burnt by the sun and frozen with the winter frost. He observes that in France the products of the spirit cannot compare with the products of agriculture and industry; that the dramas of Racine are not fashioned so finely as the wines of Bordeaux; that the pictures of Delacroix are not so good as the oysters of Arcachon; and that, on the other hand, our great men, Cervantes, Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, are the equals or more than the equals of the great men of any other country; while our actual life is not equal to, not the life of Morocco, but the life of Portugal. And I say: Is it not worth while to undergo the hardship of renouncing this pleasant life of France in order to breathe the spirit that can produce a Cervantes, a Velazquez, an El Greco, a Goya? Are not these perhaps incompatible with the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters of Arcachon? I believe--arbitrarily of course--that it is so, that they are incompatible, and I take my stand with _Don Quixote_, with Velazquez, with El Greco, with Goya, and against the wine of Bordeaux and the oysters of Arcachon, against Racine and Delacroix. Passion and sensuality are incompatible; passion is arbitrary, logic is sensual. For logic is nothing but a form of sensuality. “All our material and intellectual products are hard, rugged and disagreeable,” Baroja continues. “The wine is thick, the meat bad, the papers boring and the literature sad. I don’t know what it is that makes our literature so disagreeable.”