With such words Aldonza might speak, and in renouncing all glory in her arms Alonso would be truly great; but such words you can never speak, Antonia. You do not believe that love is of more worth than glory; what you believe is that neither love nor glory is worth as much as sleepy fireside peace and quiet, that neither love nor glory is worth as much as the certainty of the daily mess of pottage; you believe that those who don’t sleep easily in their beds come to a bad end, and you don’t know that love, like glory, never sleeps but watches. THE RELIGION OF QUIXOTISM I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, _La Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life--_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_. This philosophy of ours could with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was a-philosophical, positivist, technicist, given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimistic. We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers--in Don Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. Was not perhaps the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all, the philosophy latent in the abstract but passionate thought of our mystics, in its essence none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare? And the feeling that animated Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was spiritualism; he fought for the spirit. Speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like practical Quixotism, foolishness, a daughter-foolishness to the foolishness of the cross. And therefore it is contemned by reason. Philosophy at bottom abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.