That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture, which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude, moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that arch-Spaniard Joaquín Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and, while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism as the national religion. I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down our philosophy in it. For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, 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_, the _Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimist. Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within itself an implicit philosophy.