In my novel, The Tree of Knowledge, I have drawn a picture of myself, in which the psychological features remain unchanged, although I have altered the hero's environment, as well as his family relations, together with a number of details.
Besides the defects with which I have endowed my hero in this book, I was cursed with an instinctive slothfulness and sluggishness which were not to be denied.
People would tell me: "Now is the time for you to study; later on, you will have leisure to enjoy yourself; and after that will come the time to make money."
But I needed all three times in which to do nothing—and I could have used another three hundred.
PROFESSORS
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.