“All that you say is good, very good. But don’t you think that instead of going in quest of the sepulchre of Don Quixote and redeeming it from the bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes, we ought to go in quest of the sepulchre of God and rescue it from the atheists and deists who occupy it, and there, giving voice to our supreme despair and dissolving our heart in tears, wait for God to rise again and save us from nothingness?” THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO _“Pray, good gentlemen,” said the barber,[2] “let us have your opinion in this matter. I suppose you will grant this same helmet to be a basin?” “He that dares grant any such thing,” said Don Quixote, “must know that he lies plainly, if he is a knight; but, if a squire, he lies abominably.”_ That’s right, my lord Don Quixote, that’s right. It is courage, it is the barefaced courage that is ready to affirm a thing aloud and before all the world and to defend the affirmation of it to the death, it is courage that creates all truths. Things are so much the truer the more they are believed, and it is not intelligence but will that imposes them upon the world. “Now I swear before you all,” said Don Quixote, “by the order of knighthood which I profess, that that is the same individual helmet which I won from him, without the least addition or diminution.” To which Sancho added, in timid support of his master: “That I will swear, for since my lord won it, he never fought but once in it, and that was the battle wherein he freed those ungracious galley-slaves, who by the same token would have knocked out his brains with a shower of stones, had not this same honest basin-helmet saved his skull.” In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says: “I wrote my _Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho_ in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to track down our philosophy in it.” Readers of Don Quixote will recall the encounter between the Knight of La Mancha and the barber who had clapped his brass basin on his head to keep his hat from being spoiled by the rain. Having routed his enemy, the Knight seized the basin, which he asserted to be the golden helmet of Mambrino, a famous Saracen (see _Orlando Furioso_, Canto I). When afterwards the barber met Don Quixote at an inn and claimed his basin, the dispute as to whether it was really a basin or a helmet was referred to the rest of the company, some of whom sided with the Knight and others with the barber.