Ortega y Gasset impresses me as a traveller who has journeyed through
the world of culture. He moves upon a higher level, which it is
difficult to reach, and upon which it is still more difficult to
maintain oneself.
It may be that Ortega has no great sympathy for my manner of living,
which is insubordinate; it may be that I look with unfriendly eye upon
his ambitious and aristocratic sympathies; nevertheless, he is a master
who brings glad news of the unknown--that is, of the unknown to us.
Doctor San Martín was fond of telling how he was sitting one day upon a
bench in the Retiro, reading.
"Are you reading a novel?" inquired a gentleman, sitting down beside
him.
"No, I am studying."
"What! Studying at your age?" exclaimed the gentleman, amazed.
The same remark might be made to me: "What! Sitting under a master at
your age?"
As far as I am concerned, every man who knows more than I do is my
master.
I know very well that philosophy and metaphysics are nothing to the
great mass of physicians who pick up their science out of foreign
reviews, adding nothing themselves to what they read; nor, for that
matter, are they to most Spanish engineers, who are skilled in doing
sufficiently badly today what was done in England and Germany very well
thirty years ago; and the same thing is true of the apothecaries. The
practical is all that these people concede to exist, but how do they
know what is practical? Considering the matter from the practical point
of view, there can be no doubt but that civilization has attained a high
development wherever there have been great metaphysicisms, and then with
the philosophers have come the inventors, who between them are the glory
of mankind. Unamuno despises inventors, but in this case it is his
misfortune. It is far easier for a nation which is destitute of a
tradition of culture to improvise an histologist or a physicist, than a
philosopher or a real thinker.
Ortega y Gasset, the only approach to a philosopher whom I have ever
known, is one of the few Spaniards whom it is interesting to hear talk.