In the third part of the “Ethics” of Spinoza, a Jew of Spanish origin—or Portuguese, which amounts to the same thing—there are four admirable propositions, the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth, in which he lays it down that everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being; that the endeavour wherewith a thing endeavours to persist in its being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing (conatus, quo unaquæque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est præter ipsius rei actualem essentiam); that this effort or endeavour involves no finite time but an indefinite time, and that the spirit endeavours to persist in its being for an indefinite period and is conscious of this its endeavour. It is not possible to express with more precision the longing for immortality that consumes the soul.
This strong individualism, the individualism of an individual who endeavours to persist, has led the Spaniard to follow always the path of conduct and will, and this is the reason of Schopenhauer’s admiration of Spaniards, whom he deemed to be one of the peoples most fully possessed of will—or rather of wilfulness—most tenacious of life. Our indifference to life is only on the surface and really conceals a most dogged attachment to it. And this practical tendency is manifest in our thought, which ever since Seneca has inclined to what is called moralism and has evinced but little interest in pure metaphysical and speculative contemplation, in viewing the world as a spectator.
It is this imperious individualism that has led us to the dogmatism that corrodes us. Spain is the country of those who are more papistical than the Pope, as the saying is. Spain is the chosen and most propitious soil for what is called integrism, which is the triumph of the maximum of individuality compatible with the minimum of personality. Spain was, in short, and in more than one respect continues to be, the land of the Inquisition.
Of the Inquisition and inquisitorialism, Hume writes very aptly. “Innate cruelty, individual pride, a vivid imagination long fed with extravagant fables, religious and secular, and lust for unearned wealth, all combined under the eager blessings of the Queen [Isabel] and the Church to make the Spaniards, as a race, relentless persecutors of those who dared to think differently from themselves.” Beneath the manifest and not inconsiderable exaggeration, there is here a large basis of truth. Spaniards could do no wrong “because they were working for and with the cause of God.” “The bureaucratic unity of the Romans was no longer possible [in the time of Fernando and Isabel], for out of the reconquest had grown separate nations; but at least the various peoples, the autonomous dominions, the semi-independent towns, might be held together by the strong bond of religious unity; and with this object the Inquisition was established, as a governmental system, to be developed later into a political engine.... Thus it is that Spain appears for the first time in the concert of modern European nations a power whose very existence in a concrete form depends upon its rigid doctrinal Catholicism.” This last assertion appears to me so doubtful and I am so far from believing it to be just that I shall have to devote a special study to its refutation.
This Spanish individualism has undoubtedly been the cause of another characteristic feature of our history, a feature to which Hume pays very particular attention. It is known as cantonalism or kabylism. I refer of course to our tendency to disruption, to separate into tribes. Hume alludes to it at the beginning of his history in the following notable lines: “In any case, what is known of their physique seems to negative the supposition that they [the Iberians] were of Indo-European or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyl tribes of the Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain, who were driven back into the mountains by successive waves of invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniard of to-day. The organization of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic was their indomitable local independence. Warlike and brave, sober and light-hearted, the Kabyl tribesman has for thousands of years stubbornly resisted all attempts to weld him into a nation or subject him to a uniform dominion, while the Iberian, starting probably from the same stock, was blended with Aryan races possessing other qualities, and was submitted for six centuries to the unifying organization of the greatest governing race the world ever saw—the Romans; yet, withal, even at the present day, the main characteristics of the Spanish nation, like that of the Kabyl tribes, is lack of solidarity.”
This fundamental idea appears all through Hume’s book like a refrain or leitmotiv.
Out of all this, two questions now emerge: the first, what is the origin of this individualism? and the second, what is its cure?—the one ethnological, the other therapeutical.
As I indicated at the beginning, in quoting the opinion of Havelock Ellis, I am not at all disposed to believe that kabylism or cantonalism, the separatist tendency, proceeds from differences of race. If Cataluña or the Basque provinces could be forthwith removed and isolated in the middle of the Atlantic, we should very soon see them torn by internal dissensions, by separatist tendencies, and conflicts for supremacy would arise between the various dialects of the Catalan and Basque languages. In the Basque provinces such internal dissensions are beginning to be patent even to the least acute observer.
There is one capital sin that is very peculiarly Spanish, and that sin is envy. It is a result of our peculiar individualism, and it is one of the causes of kabylism. Envy has crippled and still cripples not a few of the best minds of Spain, minds that are in other respects vigorous and exuberant. We are all familiar with the famous simile of the greasy pole. Deep down in our racial character there is a certain sediment of spiritual avarice, of lack of generosity of soul, a certain propensity to consider ourselves rich only in so far as others are poor, and this sediment requires to be purged away.
Spanish kabylism and individualism both appear to me to be effects of one and the same cause, the cause that also produced picarism. In his book entitled Hampa, Salillas showed very clearly how the poverty of the soil, its failure to serve as a basis for the support of the people, was responsible for the seasonal migration of flocks and herds together with the vagabond life that resulted therefrom. It appears to me more concrete and more historical to say that it obliged the Iberians to be herdsmen. Hume expresses it exactly when he says that the pure Spaniard has always been “an agriculturist by necessity and a shepherd by choice,