Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. “Then let him not demand it,” it will be said, “let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are.” But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who are able to resign themselves and to accept rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows? And in this critical century Don Quixote, who has contaminated himself with criticism also, has to attack his own self, the victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, and it is when he wishes to be most spontaneous that he appears most affected. And the poor fellow wishes to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into the inner despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through despair he attains the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that Don Quixote of the mind who escaped from the cloister--and he becomes an awakener of sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican said of himself. “Heroic love,” Bruno wrote, “is the property of those superior natures called insane [_insano_]--not because they do not know [_non sanno_], but because they over-know [_soprasanno_].” But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines--at any rate they have stated on the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, that it is dedicated to him by the age which he foretold (_il secole da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who has risen from the dead, the inward Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who is conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be written upon the cross. What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote in the world of to-day? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears, though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death. LARGE AND SMALL TOWNS