Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy. And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique of Pure Reason_. But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us, animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence. This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness. And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta, camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities," as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than _credo_.