I broke off this essay at this point two days ago, with the intention of continuing it, of resuming the broken thread, as occasion offered, and now to-day, the 13th of May, I have just read a phrase that alters the course of my discourse. Something of the kind happens to rivers when a rock deflects their course and causes them to disembogue many leagues away from where they would otherwise have disembogued, perhaps into another sea altogether. It is curious what happens to our ideas. We have often in our mind a crowd of ideas that vegetate in the darkness, withered, incomplete, unacquainted with one another and avoiding one another. For in the darkness, ideas, like men, are afraid of one another. And they remain obscured, disassociated, avoiding contact. But suddenly a new and luminous idea enters the mind, emitting light and illuminating the dark corner, and as soon as the other ideas see it and see their own faces, they recognize one another, they arise and gather round the new arrival, they embrace and form a fraternity and recover their full life. So it has happened with me to-day when a number of half-alive and shadowy ideas that have been lying isolated in a corner of my mind have been joined by this new idea that I have just read in a Madrid newspaper, _La Correspondencia de España_, of yesterday’s date, the 12th of May. In an article that it publishes, entitled “Current Events--Cánovas,” the author says: “Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain. Cánovas never knew of what stuff his fellow-countrymen were made.” The moment that I read this, I realized, as if by a sudden illumination, the difference that there is between the soul of Spain and the aggregate of the souls of all us Spaniards who are living to-day, the actual synthesis of these same souls. And I remembered that at the time of the last Carlist civil war, when I was a boy, I heard someone in my native town say: “Even though all we men of Bilbao were to become Carlists, Bilbao would remain liberal.” A paradox--that is to say, a profound arbitrary truth, a truth of passion, a truth of the heart, and one that I shall never forget. “Sagasta understood Spaniards, but not Spain.” And all our commonplace rulers, those who let themselves drift with the stream and enjoy long years of office, all our commonplace writers, those who write books that are just long tirades, books that sell, all our commonplace artists and all our commonplace thinkers, understand their fellow-countrymen, but not their country. Not only our own souls, the souls of us who are living to-day, are alive and operative in the soul of Spain, but in addition to these, the souls of all our forefathers. Our own souls, those of the living, are those that are least alive in it, for our soul does not enter into the soul of our country until it is no longer a detached entity, until after our temporal death.