were too dominant for a culture based on transcendental values. Medievalism in Spain became a maniacal gesture. Modernism? It is the breakdown of the medieval culture: its intellectualism, its systematization is a vast Machine proficient at destroying, and creating nothing. Is this what Spain must come to, to be saved? Unamuno reconsiders; and by 1905 he has his answer--which is indeed a conversion. Unamuno is an expression of dynamic egoism. This atom has got loose from the locked coil of Spain; and what a surge it has! Yet all his doctrine comes rather simply down to the assertion of an immense personal will emerging from the stratified social trammels of his land. The intrinsic substance of Unamuno’s thought will strike the Western mind as meager; but the drama of its formulation is a new act in Spain, the flesh of its assertion is a fresh embodiment of the Spanish spirit. This announcement of a personal will recalls at once earlier apocalypses of the north: Blake, Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche. Unamuno’s assertion is important, because it is made up of the conflicting substances of Spain. The voice of this man declaring that he will never die, and that he will never live according to the herd-patterns of modern Europe, becomes palpable and true, because it is so deeply Spanish. Perhaps the æsthetic value of the utterances of Whitman, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Blake is similarly grounded in racial substance. The case is evident in Unamuno. Freeing himself from the still equipoise of Spain he frees himself from nothing that is Spanish. In Unamuno, the same Spanish spirit heretofore held in tragic unison--in the actless unison of its will--swings once more into motion. Instead of equating each other, the elements of the Spanish soul line up _behind_ the soul of Unamuno and serve to project him, parabola-wise, into his personal heaven. Here is Spain’s neo-medieval sense of the futility of life; here is Christ; here is Spain’s narcistic love of the extremes within her, whence arose the pícaro and the saint. Here above all is Spain, enemy of pragmatism and of rational progress, worshiper of the Absolute--Spain that will be heaven or hell, and never merely earth; and yet will not loose her hold on earth, in all her visions of heaven.