I need the immortality of my soul, the indefinite persistence of my individual consciousness--I need it. Without it, without faith in it, I cannot live, and doubt, the inability to believe that I shall attain it, torments me. And since I need it, my passion leads me to affirm it, and to affirm it arbitrarily, and when I attempt to make others believe, to make myself believe, I do violence to logic and make use of arguments which are called ingenious and paradoxical by those unfortunate people who have no passion and who contemplate their ultimate dissolution with resignation. The man of passion, the arbitrary man, is the only real rebel, and nothing makes a more grotesque impression upon me than when I come across those--usually gallicized--individuals who proclaim themselves emancipated from all tyrannies, lovers of liberty, _esprits forts_, anarchists sometimes, frequently atheists, but who nevertheless are the faithful devotees of logic and of the code of good taste. Yes, emphasis, turgidity, conceptism, paradoxism, these are the language passion speaks, and, on the other hand, there is nothing less natural, for us Spaniards at any rate, than that which the French call _naturel_ and which is usually the refined product of an exquisite and artificial elaboration. Some Frenchman has said that French literature is that which gives the most eloquent expression to the great commonplaces of humanity; but I would say that it is in this literature, which has done and still does so much harm in Spain, that all middling ideas and middling feelings find their most adequate form and expression, and that it is hostile to extreme ideas and extreme feelings. Observe that the French spirit has produced no great mystic, no really great pure mystic. Observe that upon Pascal, although he was somewhat arbitrary and passionate, geometry made a profound impression. And consider the fact that Pascal is one of the French spirits that we are best able to appropriate. It is to this most profound and tortured spirit that we owe two great and profound instances, among others, of tormentingly arbitrary utterance: that of the _pari_ or wager, and that of _il faut s’abêtir_, “we must become as fools”--in order to believe, beginning with acting as if we did believe. But I don’t know of any great mystic, any really pure mystic, who was a Frenchman. And here I should like to say something about the gentle, tranquil, sensual and logical St. Francis of Sales, so full of common sense and of a spiritual _via media_, but I must leave it for some other time. And it is the æsthetic of this people, so opposed to our own, in spite of all that nonsense about the Latin sisterhood--I don’t know whether they are Latin, I don’t know whether we are, and as regards myself personally, I believe that there is nothing Latin about me--it is the æsthetic of this people that is deforming the fruit of our spirit as it is expressed in many of our spiritual creators.