And, moreover I am not anxious for a reputation among scholars, for I am not a scholar, I am not what is called a scholar. Nor even among men of culture, although I am always preaching culture. But by culture I understand the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest desire. I come of a race which some people say is still, in its essence, in a state of savagery, a race of a turbulent and taciturn spirit, a race of which Salmerón said that it had not yet adapted itself to European civilization. And so far as I myself and my own branch of the race[4] are concerned, I accept this judgment and I accept it with pride. No, no, friend, I am not a philanthropist. The hunger and thirst for God are too strong within me for me to love men in the philanthropic way. Needs must be sown among men germs of doubt, of distrust, of inquietude, and even of despair--why not? yes, even of despair--and if thereby they lose what they call happiness, since it is not really happiness, they have lost nothing. And above all and before all, none of this living in peace with all the world! Living in peace with all the world--horrible, horrible, horrible! No, no, no, none of this living in peace. Peace, spiritual peace I mean, is usually a lie and is usually stagnation. I do not wish to live in peace either with others or with myself. I need war, inward war. We all need war. Truth before peace. That is my watchword. And to give it greater brilliance I will write it in Latin: _veritas primus pace_. And it goes without saying that the war that I need as the sustenance of my life and of the lives of others is a spiritual war, not war with gun and sword. All the rest--in spite of whatever the champions of the central current of culture and of disciplined solidarity and of respect for the so-called definitive conquests of the human spirit may say--all the rest I understand and I am even ready to applaud it if you like; but it is not my concern, it is not my lot to put myself at its service. And above all, my friend, there is one thing that I have hated all my life and that I hope to die hating, and that is, becoming the prisoner of my public, submitting to follow the course marked out for me by my readers. I will not sacrifice my independence, above all I will not mortgage my future. You understand? I will not mortgage my future. I will keep it open and free. And so I alienate sympathy?... Who knows? What I want to avoid is public indifference. Sympathies and antipathies are perhaps the same thing. Antipathy--now for a paradox!--is a form of sympathy. Reading me for the sake of being annoyed and quarrelling with what I say or my way of saying it, is the same as reading me and agreeing with what I say. To combat a man is one way of animating and confirming him.