Not, however, before he had met the opposing, clamorous word of the man who, gradually, was to veer to his own vision. Miguel de Unamuno[39] had corresponded with Ganivet while they were young in Madrid. The result of their exchange was _El Porvenir de España_, a volume in which they estimate the opposing doctrines: that Spain must be awakened by letting in “ultra-pyrenean currents,” and that Spain has been ruined precisely by these currents. To Ganivet, the history of Spain reveals no “Spanish period.” Let there be one! he cries. Unamuno counters that eclecticism is the unity of Spain. “Spain is still to be discovered,” he thunders, “and will be discovered only by European Spaniards.” In the volume which defines this attitude of his youth, _En Torno al Casticizmo_, he diagnoses the abulia of Spain. The Inquisition was bad because it shut out the four winds of Europe: Spain was forced to feed upon herself. Spain’s historical tradition was bad, because it was anti-European. He declares for the _corrientes ultrapirenáicas_. Ganivet was dead. Even had he lived, this mystic afield in history must have lacked the power to answer Unamuno. Unamuno is the strongest moralist of our day. Wells and Shaw have thin voices beside his well-aimed uproar. There was no one, then, in Spain to answer Unamuno. Unamuno answered himself. His answer is not analytic. This radical mystic scorns the fuss of argument. The Inquisition, shutting out the “four winds” from Spain was indeed “bad.” Its purpose--unity--was good. Its confusing homogeneity with unity and its means of action were not Spanish at all: were of Rome, of France, of Europe. Spain had been the most tolerant land of all the West: even Islam grew tolerant in Spain: Rome alone, making the Visigoth into crusader and winning Isabel to its own waning theoditic dream, made Spain intolerant. The historical tradition which won in Spain was also European: it was a mixture of the state policy of France and the church policy of Rome. (France was never guilty of such nonsense: France the State was consistently anti-Roman.) Finally, whence came these “ultra-pyrenean currents” that were to flush Spain once more with fecund air? They were ideas that reached Western Europe by the very ethnic worlds of which Spain is the organic integer. Ideas from the Greek and Alexandrian, from the Jew and Egyptian and Arab: many entered Europe directly by the door of Spain; none came to Spain by way of western Europe. They came by the sea and the south--in that long germinal embrace whereby Phœnician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jew, Copt, Arab, Moor were poured into Spain’s womb. What Western Europe did was to transform and finally to betray these living thoughts. The Visigoth minority represented Spain’s medievalism: and its action was a retarded and arbitrary form of what in Germanic Europe produced the noble synthesis of Catholic culture. In Spain, the naturalistic Semites