It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas, which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest, dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the word, and not upon the brute perception. And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess, simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate, and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a moment all the consequences will follow." Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the beginning. Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe. And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La España Moderna_.[64] And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or, rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suárez, whose formal subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.