The Spaniard is not decadent: neither is he weak. There is as great force in him as in the days when his still unfused power conquered half Europe, discovered America and poured the vision of Cervantes, Rojas, Calderón and Velázquez upon the world. But now, all this energy is _locked_ in its own willed equation. Its original dualisms are not dead; they are controlled and neutralized. The equilibrium is complete: and what energy is left from it the Spaniard must expend in holding the equation. There is no energy unemployed: and it is precisely the excess energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation. Had he been less heroic in his will, or more objective in his way to it, the Spaniard would not be this cripple: this giant shattered by his success, this giant imprisoned in the reality of his ideal. The most willful of men, he appears will-less. For his power of will goes to dominate himself--and to hold his dominion. So that no power is left wherewith to dominate the world. The unity of Spain exists, subjectively and multiplied by millions. In consequence the Spaniard is not adhesive: he is too complete: the motive toward adhesiveness is the sense of incompletion. The most secret impulse of the Frenchman or the Jew has its social dimension. No Jew can people Zion in solitude. No French mystic or philosopher is an anchorite. Pascal and Descartes are Catholic: Paul Cézanne strives to create a new museum art. The rebel in France is a rebel against monarchs. But the Spaniard is an empire and a god unto himself. The perfected Spanish person makes permanent the social Spanish chaos. The most intellectual of men, he appears unintelligent. He lives so wholly within his Idea, that no energy is left for further ideation. Creative intelligence is the birth of conflict between the personal will and life: it is born of the pause between impulse and response and of the excess energy which remains after the instinctive action. In the Spaniard, this excess energy is small: he is too self-sufficient to know richly the pauses between will and deed; and in the relativity of values which springs from a chaotic or incompleted conscience he is poor. Having achieved his Idea, he is weak in intellect: having created his imagined world, he is weak in imagination.