Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself. My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time. A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain, Jacob Böhme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., § 142) that he did not write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all other men; and a little further on (§ 152) he adds: "Although I must become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the Spirit. And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe, the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it! In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or, rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.