I have not been fortunate in my professors. It might be urged that I
have not been in a position, being idle and sluggish, to take advantage
of their instruction. I believe, however, that if they had been good
teachers, now that so many years have passed, I should be able to
acknowledge their merits.
I cannot remember a single teacher who knew how to teach, or who
succeeded in arousing any interest in what he taught, or who had any
comprehension of the student mentality. No one learned how to reason in
the schools of my youth, nor mastered any theory, nor acquired a
practical knowledge of anything. In other words, we learned nothing.
In medicine, the professors adhered to a system that was the most
foolish imaginable. In the two universities in which I studied, subjects
might be taken only by halves, which would have been ridiculous enough
in any branch, but it was even more preposterous in medicine. Thus, in
pathology, a certain number of intending physicians studied the subject
of infection, while others studied nervous disorders, and yet others the
diseases of the respiratory organs. Nobody studied all three. A plan of
this sort could only have been conceived by Spanish professors, who, it
may be said in general, are the quintessence of vacuity.
"What difference does it make whether the students learn anything or
not?" every Spanish professor asks himself continually.
Unamuno says, apropos of the backwardness of Spaniards in the field of
invention: "Other nations can do the inventing." In other words, let
foreigners build up the sciences, so that we may take advantage of them.
There was one among my professors who considered himself a born teacher
and, moreover, a man of genius, and he was Letamendi. I made clear in my
_Tree of Knowledge_ what I thought of this professor, who was not
destitute, indeed, of a certain talent as an orator and man of letters.
When he wrote, he was rococo, like so many Catalans. Sometimes he would
discourse upon art, especially upon painting, in the class-room, but the
ideas he entertained were preposterous. I recall that he once said that
a mouse and a book were not a fit subject for a painting, but if you
were to write the words _Aristotle's Works_ on the book, and then
set the mouse to gnawing at it, what had originally meant nothing would
immediately become a subject for a picture. Yes, a picture to be hawked
at the street fairs!
Letamendi was prolixity and puerile ingenuity personified. Yet Letamendi
was no different from all other Spaniards of his day, including even the
most celebrated, such as Castelar, Echegaray and Valera.
These men read much, they possessed good memories, but I verily believe
that, honestly, they understood nothing. Not one of them had an inkling
of that almost tragic sense of the dignity of culture or of the
obligations which it imposes, which distinguishes the Germans above all
other nationalities. They nearly all revealed an attitude toward science
which would have sat easily upon a smart, sharp-tongued Andalusian young
gentleman.
I recall a profoundly moving letter by the critic Garve, which is
included in Kant's _Prolegomena_.
Garve wrote an article upon _The Critique of Pure Reason_, and sent
it to a journal at Göttingen, and the editor of the journal, in malice
and animosity toward Kant, so altered it that it became an attack on the
philosopher, and then published it unsigned.
Kant invited his anonymous critic to divulge his name, whereupon Garve
wrote to Kant explaining what had taken place, and Kant made a reply.
It would be difficult to parallel in nobility these two letters, which
were exchanged between a comprehensive intellect such as Garve and one
of the most portentous geniuses of the world, as was Kant.
They appear to be two travellers, face to face with the mystery of
Nature and the Unknown. No such feeling for learning and culture is to
be met with among our miserably affected Latin mountebanks.