But it could not be so. The human mind cannot be permanently imprisoned; and it is an obvious proof of this consoling fact, that the intellectual emancipation of Spain was begun by a man of no extraordinary gifts, and one whose position gave him no extraordinary advantages for the undertaking to which he devoted his life,--the quiet monk, Benito Feyjoó. He was born in 1676, the eldest son of respectable parents in the northwestern part of Spain, who, contrary to the opinions of their time, did not think the law of primogeniture required them to devote their first-born wholly to the duty of sustaining the honors of his family and enjoying the income of the estates he was to inherit. At the age of fourteen, his destination to the Church was determined upon; but he loved study of all kinds, and applied himself, not only to theology, but to the physical sciences and to medicine, so far as means were allowed him in the low state to which all intellectual culture was then sunk. As early as 1717, he established himself in a Benedictine convent at Oviedo, and lived there forty-seven years in as strict a retirement as his duties permitted, occupied only with his studies, and relying almost entirely on the press as the means of enlightening his countrymen. His personal character and resources, in some respects, fitted him well for the great task he had undertaken. He was a sincere Catholic, and therefore felt no disposition to interfere even with abuses that were protected by the authority of his Church; a circumstance without which he would have been stopped at the very threshold of his enterprise. His mind was strong and patient of labor; and if, on the one hand, his researches were restrained by the embarrassments of his ecclesiastical position, he had, on the other, obtained, what few Spaniards then enjoyed, the means of knowing much of what had been done in Italy, in France, and even in England, for the advancement of science during the century preceding that in which he was educated. Above all, he was honest, and seriously devoted to his work. But, as he advanced, he was shocked to find how wide a gulf separated his own country from the rest of Europe. Truth, he saw, had, on many important subjects, been so completely excluded from Spain, that its very existence was hardly suspected; and that, while Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Calderon and Quevedo, had been rioting unrestrained in the world of imagination, the solemn world of reality,--the world of moral and physical truth,--had been as much closed against inquiry as if his country had been no part of civilized Europe.