r 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 Hernan Cortes, 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
_raison d'etre_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the
most direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece. The
conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book
opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones,"
illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind
the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or
unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy
their own vital yearnings. This is followed by the statement of the will
to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual
subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy,
theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete,
"flesh and bones" character of the immortality which men desire is
reaffirmed. The Catholic position is then explained as the _vital_
attitude in the matter, summed up in Tertullian's _Credo quia absurdum_,
and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the
possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus
Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher
than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith,
exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be
apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom
of this abyss Unamuno b