Gabírol, first of Spain’s literary mystics, founds this tradition which at the end is to produce in Spain a lineage of mystics who are men of action: a lineage far removed indeed from the commoner progeny of mystics who, as they approach God, leave the terrestrial life. The early Moslem thinkers outdid even their Jewish partners in the great Courts of Córdoba and other Andalusian towns, by this tendency of their doctrines. But their universalism became materialistic. Stressing the monism of nature, they lost sight of God as the _informer_: the Prophet Mohammed shrank to a sort of intellectual agent of the will, what the Spaniards called _intendimiento agente_, a power more physical than of the spirit. There were exceptions. Avempace, the Moslem platonist, for instance, who was born in Guadix a little later than Gabírol. And his disciple, Tofaíl, whose novel _Hai-ben-Jochdam_ is a spiritual _Robinson Crusoe_, an extraordinary proof of the immanence of God. Hai, an infant, is abandoned on a desert island. A doe nurses him. The bare demands of material survival sharpen his reason: and from the purity of intellectual understanding he achieves religious revelation. His body has evoked reason, and reason evokes God. Now, at the end of his days, an aged saint comes to the island. He has reached by simple faith the same religious certitude as Hai by the exercise of mind. The circle is rounded. God is the end of all ways, and is the way of all thoughts. But the rational monism of the Moslems was not protected, like that of the Jews from a sheer materialism which made many thinkers at the Court of Abd-er-Rahman contemporaries at once of Democritus and Haeckel. The immediate plateau from which arose in Spain the Catholic mystic heights was Jewish. For many ages, the Spanish Catholics[18] contribute little to the medieval Scripture whose prophets were men like Abelard, Albertus and Aquinas. The long line of Spanish Jewish worthies droops: while in the north the subtly variant seed of Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus flowers at last into the twin rebellion of Protestantism and of rationalism. It is with the age of Calvin, of Francis Bacon, of Erasmus, that Catholic Spain finds voice at last: and in a way which is an act. By means of this late flowering in the south, modern Europe is a natural issue from the womb of the medieval Church. Rome is saved until the seed of Rome’s successorship is planted: international law is founded: America is discovered and is peopled. The tradition of such men as Gabírol and Tofaíl seemed dead, when it spoke suddenly afresh in the work of a Spanish Jew. And of this man’s influence, Menendez y Pelayo says in his classic work on the Ideas of Spain: “All the Catholic mystics, from the Dominican Fray Luis de Granada to the Jesuit Nieremberg accepted the æsthetic of Leon Hebreo integrally, knowingly.”