be drawn away from the main business of the Christian, the saving of his
soul, which, in his interpretation, means the conquest of his
immortality, his own immortality.

An individualist. Certainly. And he proudly claims the title. Nothing
more refreshing in these days of hoggish communistic cant than this
great voice asserting the divine, the eternal rights of the individual.
But it is not with political rights that he is concerned. Political
individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil
privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he
so energetically condemns as pedantic--that is, inhuman. His opposition
of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no
less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His
assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for
society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of
liberty against authority--which can be easily answered on the
rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty
of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and
longer-living "individual" than the individual pure and simple. It is
rather the unanswerable argument of eternity against duration. Now that
argument must rest on a religious basis. And it is on a religious basis
that Unamuno founds his individualism. Hence the true Spanish flavour of
his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and
analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable
tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid
and absolute, like the spirit.

Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that
childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists. It is, on the
contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses