And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that arrogantly styled itself omnium scientiarum princeps, and which Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this Spain—­“the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe, the home of the knightly ideal,” to quote from a letter which the American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day—­from this Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century.  And well they repay her for it!

In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism.  And the chief factors in de-essentializing it—­that is, in de-Catholicizing Europe—­have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or, rather, of Science with the capital letter.  And last of all, the dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.

And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in the popularization as in the vulgarization of science—­or, rather, of pseudo-science—­venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and propagandist literature.  Science sought to popularize itself as if it were its function to come down to the people and subserve their passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.

All this led Brunetiere to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this science—­if you like to call it science—­did in effect become bankrupt.  And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness, but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power, or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in culture.  And the result was pessimism.

Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy.  What end did progress serve?  Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the Kulturkampf did not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call the final finality is the real hontos hon.  And the famous maladie du siecle, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more plainly in Senancour’s Obermann than in any other character, neither was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human finality of the Universe.

The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr. Faustus.