only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching
within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which
cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the inner
contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy
and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here
the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn
away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that
passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the
slightest thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would
appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is precisely
because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of his own life that he
thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every argument which he finds
in his mind--his own mind, a part of his life--against the possibility
of life after death; but it is also because he feels that, despite such
conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres, that he refuses to
his intellect the power to kill his faith. A knight-errant of the
spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his
adventures after having, like Hernán Cortés, burnt his ships. But, is it
necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he
wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title
for one of his short stories, _nothing less than a whole man_. Not a
mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world
stage, singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a
compromise; but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his
negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies,
and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal
life.

This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt,
or, as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's