Post scriptum that Cajal added to the second edition (1899) of the text of the speech he delivered upon being admitted (1897) to the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, Rational Foundations and Technical Conditions of Biological Research (Fundamentos racionales y condiciones tecnicas de la investigacion biologica), titled in later editions Rules and Advice on Scientific Research (Reglas y consejos sobre investigacion cientifica). Nowhere better than in these lines, which he removed in subsequent editions of Rules and Advice, did Santiago Ramon y Cajal show how much he loved and cared for Spain.
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This Post scriptum is the finest reflection of the spirit of ‘98, and given its interest I believe it necessary to rescue and reproduce it in this work. It deserves careful reading without losing sight of the context in which it was written, to which we shall allude further on. It is by no means a defeatist text; it is a writing of conscience full of sincerity and foresight, addressed to politicians, professors, workers, industrialists, aristocrats, the clergy, students… to whom he enumerates the ancestral ills of the nation but also addresses the finest words of encouragement and hope for overcoming the situation. Cajal’s words in this text, moreover, convey the responsibility of understanding and practicing the profound ideas they express.
Post Scriptum
We were far from suspecting, when we published the preceding pages in which we lamented our disdain for science, that we would very soon reap the fruit of our ignorance. A rich and powerful nation, thanks to its science and industriousness, has defeated us almost without a fight. In so unequal a battle, waged between sentiment and reality, between a people asleep upon the routines of the past and another energetic, awake, and acquainted with all the resources of the present, the result was foreseeable; but it must be confessed that our ignorance, even more than our poverty, caused the disaster, in which we did not even achieve the sad consolation of selling our lives dearly. Once again science, creator of wealth and strength, has avenged itself upon those who fail to know it and hold it in contempt.
Through ignorance, we were ignorant even of the irresistible strength of the adversary: the science of their engineers and chemists (inventors of incendiary bombs that swept the decks of our ships and made all defense impossible), the superiority of their vessels and armor, the excellence and accuracy of their artillerymen, the energy and skill of their generals.
And the most grievous thing is that the disaster could have been avoided, if among the people and the Spanish statesmen there had existed a true political sense, that supreme quality of practical peoples that the great Alexander von Humboldt already found wanting in our race. Because in these times of cold positivism only Spain conducts a politics of sentiment.
What has led us to ruin is not so much the ideas we lack, but the sentiments and illusions we have in excess. The chivalrous sentiment of honor, excellent for individuals, gravely injures peoples when it is not counterbalanced by the criterion of collective utility. Say what they will, those who dream of a past that will never return, politics is made with interests, not with affections. What is owed is what is useful to the nation. The progress of communities, like the progress of the zoological series, is governed by the stern principle of the utility of the race, to which nations endowed with a sure political instinct must sacrifice cherished legends, impatient yearnings for dominion and glory, and international sympathies and antipathies. And when faced with the danger of an international conflict, peoples must found their hopes not on the heroisms of the race nor on the possible favors of providence or fortune, but on rigorous calculation, on the candid knowledge, without patriotic mirages or ridiculous bluster, of their true strength and the real power of the adversary.
But this is no longer the time to philosophize about the causes of our fall, but to rise as quickly as possible. Let us look forward, let us lift our hearts to hope, and let us devote ourselves to developing our energies, encouraged by a robust faith in the redemptive virtue of work and in the future reserved for our race. Others fell lower than we and today they shine at the zenith of power and fortune. Let us exchange enervating despondency for virile joy, for a yearning for strength, youth, and renewal. Let us flee from pessimism as from a mortal virus: he who expects to die ends by dying; and, on the contrary, he who aspires to life creates life. Let us then be optimists, for only in joy and serenity does one feel strong and work and hope.
But the dreamed-of future will not come of its own accord, nor will it be brought by the protection of foreigners or the blind lottery of chance: the future renewal will be the reward of our work, of our science, of our knowledge of reality, and of our love for our homeland and our race.
Pain itself will be useful to us, for pain is the great educator of souls and creator of energies. For those who love their homeland, misfortunes represent one more moral bond. As Renan eloquently says, “the homeland is formed by those who have suffered together, for common grief unites more than joy” (“la patria esta formada por los que han sufrido juntos, porque el dolor comun une mas que la alegria”). Only ungrateful hearts and ignoble spirits abandon the homeland in days of mourning and bitterness. On the contrary, well-born souls must measure their love for their own by the magnitude of their misfortunes. And the homeland is both the native soil and its history, both those of the present and those yet to come, our glories as well as our sorrows. The good patriot must fill his heart with a sentiment of sublime paternity toward all his fellow citizens, with an immense and effusive charity that extends even to those yet unborn.
No despondency, no taking dire prophecies seriously. Let us show those nations that declare us dead, doubtless because they await the hour of dividing our remnants, that we not only live, but that we are resolved to vigorously affirm our right to life. Pain itself bears witness to existence; for he who is indignant is not dead, nor he who laments his misfortune, nor he who feels the blood boil in his heart with surges of indignation over the past: the truly dead are those who remain silent, those who accept their misfortunes philosophically, those who no longer even have the strength to feel them. These decrepit souls, many of whom bear grave responsibility for our disasters, are the true corpses that each of us must bury in our memory and erase from our heart.
We have said it a thousand times and we must repeat it to the point of tedium. Spain’s political power will be the fruit of wealth and of the increase of its population: results for which there is no other path than to create, at whatever cost, original science, industry, and art. Once created, the current of exportation will be rapidly established and with it will come abundance, regard, respect, and even the affection of foreigners.
May this objective be ardently desired and clearly felt by our politicians, scientists, farmers, capitalists, industrialists, engineers, and even by the humblest workers, and our redemption shall be a reality, and the sun of glory shall once again caress our faded banner, not so much scorned by foreigners as by ourselves!
Oh, if I could transmit to our politicians, our capitalists, our scholars and engineers, our workers and students a part of the enthusiasm that animates me! If I had the assurance of being heard, with what pleasure I would say to them:
Politicians who have brought us to this sad misfortune, for God’s sake grant a truce, before the agonies of the homeland, to your narrow party or clique selfishness; concern yourselves seriously with purity and morality in public administration, with the cultivation of honor and heroism in the army, with serious and effective protection of popular and university instruction, with maintaining, in short, in all the organs of the State the sense of duty and the strictest accountability. Consider that, as Carlyle said, “courage is still a value,” that heroism is still a great enterprise, that virtue and discipline still constitute the strength and prestige of modest peoples. Renounce all ridiculous messianism, all mad ambition for conquest, and proceed without delay to the work of our redemption with all the ancient energy and stubbornness of the race, and in the midst of that concentration, that solemn silence with which nature performs its fecund and grandiose renewals.
To professors of all kinds—physicists, chemists, engineers, naturalists, physicians, philosophers, sociologists, etc.—I would say: work today more than ever for the creation of original and characteristically Spanish science. It will not suffice, to bring ourselves level with cultured countries, to progress at the lazy rhythm of always; we are so far behind that it will be necessary to concentrate in a few years the productive energy of two centuries. If you lack courage for this great and redemptive enterprise, surround yourselves with powerful stimuli, with those moral excitants that heat the brain and hypertrophy the heart: insults that provoke one to furious work, memories that continuously rekindle love for the homeland; or, in other words, next to the retort, the balance, or the microscope, place the national flag to constantly remind you of your condition as warriors (for a function of war, and a most beautiful and patriotic one, it is to wrest secrets from nature with the aim of defending and honoring the homeland), and keep in sight, written in large letters so that all distraction is impossible, those bitter phrases of contempt, those words of depressive commiseration, and those stinging ironies with which foreign writers have thrown in our face a thousand times our lack of originality and our supposed incapacity for scientific work. Those of you with a pedagogical vocation, concern yourselves seriously with transforming the minds of our children, deformed by four centuries of mental servitude, into modern minds adapted to reality, into men who know things better than they know books; disposed to action rather than to words; capable, in short, of vigorously undertaking the conquest of nature. Instill in them, above all, methods of study, the art of thinking for themselves, practical ideas, the fecund and luminous principles whose application has produced industrial inventions and scientific discoveries. Create, in short, not erudites and quietists, dilettantes of knowledge, content with the mere knowledge of truth, but energetic wills, reforming spirits capable of carrying the idea into reality and of reacting vigorously against all the fatalities and deficiencies of soil, race, and social and political organization.
And those of you who feel higher aspirations, who find yourselves sufficiently armed to compete and fight in the international field of scientific, literary, or artistic inquiry, redouble your activity and your zeal. The homeland will generously repay your efforts, because Spain, which has never begrudged gifts and applause to supposed scholars and frustrated inventors, if only for the wholesome and patriotic intention they demonstrated, what would it not be capable of doing for the promoters of positive progress!
Consider that every new idea, not offset by another born among us, is one more link in our mental servitude, a contribution we must pay in gold, and that will be collected in perpetuity in Berlin, Paris, or London.
Because every intellectual servitude has as its wage the gold of the rich or the toil of the poor, that is, blood and life consumed without repair, and irremediable weakness and degeneration of the race.
Those of you with a vocation for engineering and the physical sciences, do not forget that every machine you fail to invent, imported from foreign countries, has an equivalent of poverty that spreads throughout the entire nation, blocking the path to life for Spaniards who have not been born, but who will never be born either; while, on the contrary, every fecund invention born among us represents a ferment of Spanish life and a wellspring of collective honor and wealth.
You too, workers and small industrialists, can powerfully contribute to the great enterprise of our advancement. Work well, but educate yourselves first, so that your work may attain the greatest possible perfection and originality. If in your breast beats a patriotic heart, are you not ashamed to hear how foreigners mock you as unskilled, crude, and even lazy; how they suppose you devoid of ingenuity and inventiveness; how, in short, they recall, to belittle you, that even the humblest instruments with which you work bear the stamp of London or Paris? Will you prove incapable of shaking off your laziness and your routine?
Oh, how much the national wealth would gain if our manufacturers, small industrialists, and workers were well persuaded that positive and lasting profit springs exclusively from the originality, perfection, or extreme cheapness of the work, and that every industry exclusively reliant on the domestic market, thanks to extraordinarily protectionist tariffs, serves the interests of the homeland only by halves and constantly runs the risk of ruin at the first innovation arising abroad!
Let us repeat once more to our manufacturers and industrialists that they must never lose sight of the ideal, which consists in abandoning as degrading all tutelage, and in competing and winning in the international market; and that the textiles, machines, chemicals, art objects, instruments of work, trifles of fashion, etc., imported without sufficient compensation in the balance of exports, are gold taken from us, life escaping us, strength with which the foreigner will perhaps forge the chains of tomorrow’s slavery.
We all wish to enjoy the advantages of civilization, of which it has rightly been said that it beautifies and extends life, abolishes time and space, and brings to the home of the poor delights and satisfactions formerly reserved exclusively for the wealthy. But from the national point of view, civilization can be a great misfortune; a source of power and advancement for the peoples who collaborate in it, it proves ruinous, unto bankruptcy, for nations bound to the prejudices and routines of the past, for those of whom it has been said with graphic phrase that they produce in the old way and spend in the modern way (“producen a la antigua y gastan a la moderna”).
You too, opulent aristocrats, capitalists and landowners, all who by one path or another, lawful or unlawful, have managed to emancipate yourselves from the honorable servitude of work, have a great mission to fulfill. What great things you could accomplish, without great sacrifices, if, abandoning somewhat the greed for material pleasures, the unpatriotic fondness for the unhealthy and childish vanity of the theater box, the horse, the wager, the worship of bullfighting, etc., you were to think a little about the misfortunes of the homeland and its sad destiny! Wealth is power, it is force, but it should not be force squandered in pleasure, energy consumed in the smoke of vanity. To a greater sum of influence and fortune there should correspond greater responsibility and more active collaboration in the civilizing work of the homeland. In times past, wealth played an honorable role: arming soldiers, raising castles, and fighting vigorously for king and religion. Today, customs having changed, with no infidels to combat, no intolerance to maintain, the patriotism of the powerful still has a broad field in which to exercise itself: fostering national industry, improving agriculture, creating educational institutes, subsidizing research, protecting the sciences and the arts, placing, if not the sword, then gold and intelligence at the service of the culture and well-being of the nation. Only thus will the rich attain a sympathetic place in the mind of a society where winds of socialism constantly fan the hatred between capital and labor; only in this way shall we all forget this sad truth: “That wealth represents the overwork of the proletarian, and that the pleasure of the capitalist is the transfiguration of the pain and tears of the poor” (“Que la riqueza representa el sobretrabajo del proletario y que el placer del capitalista es la transfiguracion del dolor y de las lagrimas del pobre”).
And you, enlightened clergy, who on more than one occasion have given proof of patriotism, remember religion and worship, but do not forget man and nature. Consider that in these times of the cold reason of State no one conducts a politics of sentiment, and that in international disputes it is no longer faith that conquers but science and wealth. Interest yourselves, then, in the material prosperity of the homeland, for, in the final analysis, upon this prosperity depends whether Catholicism shall have in Spain, instead of a gaunt and sad Quixote, beaten by the Protestant or freethinker Yanguesans, a stalwart and vigorous champion, ready to revive the laurels of Lepanto and Pavia.
Abandon forever those terrible intolerances that made the name of Spain odious in the world, and take as your example and lesson the infinite charity of God, who bestows His gifts upon all the workers of the earth, without regard for whether they address their prayers from the Protestant temple, the Catholic basilica, or that great Church of nature whose vault is the blue of the sky, whose lamp is the sun, the earth its altar, and the knowledge and praise of God’s work its offering.
Ah, what a great enterprise you could carry out with the enormous ascendancy you possess over the powerful of the earth if, in addition to concerning yourselves with the purity of customs and the peace of souls, you were to become passionate about science and the material well-being of peoples! How great, noble, and civilizing would the mission of the Church be if the select talents that vegetate in its cloisters, granting a truce to the tenacious endeavor of converting science into a servant of religion or of demonstrating the possible harmony of both, were seriously to set about creating original science, philosophy, and art, thus rendering equal homage to the word and the work of God!
Do not attempt, for God’s sake, Spanish clergy, to renew bloody and fratricidal wars, and consider that, even should you triumph, even should by a miracle of Providence your victories not provoke foreign intervention, they would consummate the ruin of the homeland. With triumph you might perhaps fill heaven with Spaniards; but assuredly, and to the great contentment of heretics, very few Spaniards would remain on earth. Do not forget, finally, that foreigners, Protestants, freethinkers, and even Catholics have said a thousand times that your intransigence is the true cause of our poverty, political decadence, and incapacity for scientific production; that thanks to the Inquisition and clericalism, that sun which never set on our dominions was never the sun of science and truth, but the bonfire of fanaticism and religious intolerance. Before such accusations there is only one victorious response: to enter sincerely into the current of modern life, and to prepare the future, enlisting resolutely in the cause of civilization, which, in the final analysis, is also the cause of God and of humanity.
And you, studious youth, hope of our renewal, who consecrate yourselves to work in these mournful days of our decline, do not lose heart. Behold in our fall the work of ignorance or half-knowledge, the fruit of a most disastrous academic and social education, which has always consisted in turning one’s back on reality, submerging the national spirit, like the morphine addict, in an imaginary world full of feigned delights and dangerous illusions. Under the pretense of exciting adherence to the homeland, or perhaps out of ill-conceived vanity, we have always concealed from the youth: in the historical order, the defects of our race and the virtue and valor of the foreigner; in the geographical and physical order, the poverty of our soil (an immense sterile central plateau, dotted with some oases and bordered by a strip of fertile land) and the inclemency of an almost African sky; in the social and political sphere, our indiscipline, particularism, and the atavism of caudillismo, that is, the fetishistic cult of the saber, which resurges continually like a parasitic plant on the apparently firm terrain of our constitutional and democratic regime; in the scientific, philosophical, industrial, and literary spheres, our lack of originality and our vice of hyperbole, which leads us to honor as geniuses mere translators or adapters of old or exotic ideas.
The picture I have drawn is somewhat somber; but I do not present it for your examination out of the mere caprice of saddening you, but because I judge it an inexcusable duty of yours to know the full extent and depth of the malady, in order to seek the remedy, proportioning the magnitude of the effort to the magnitude of the obstacle.
There are material pleasures and intellectual delights: decadent nations cultivate the former; the latter have built the greatness and glory of the most advanced and powerful. Seek, then, you studious youth, pleasure not in the gross delights of the flesh, but in the sovereign enjoyment of duty fulfilled, in the sublime satisfaction of having broadened the horizon of knowledge, of having honored and exalted the race, and of having improved in some measure the existence of your compatriots.
May every foreign book in which you see no Spanish names cited be a goad that penetrates your soul and excites your thirst for knowledge and originality!
Be like Themistocles, whom the glory of Miltiades would not let sleep. Consider every important discovery brought from abroad as a reproach to your negligence and your faintheartedness.
You must divine, through the description of the new fact, these annoying words that its author addresses to you: “I have created this because I have known how to think and work more and better than you; henceforth your office shall be to extol me and envy me, because with my discovery I have snatched from you forever an honor you longed for and have limited the field of your possible triumphs.”
Far, however, from leading you to despondency, these considerations should increase your ardor and your eagerness for combat. Every discovery is the seed of a tree whose fruits are harvested by the emulators of the author and by studious posterity. Endeavor, then, to apply yourself to the knowledge of the new conquest; do not cease until you have expanded and surpassed it. In this way, when success smiles upon you, you will be able to reply to the foreigner: “You have created a truth, but I have known how to find other truths that eluded your penetration; I have managed to transform the new and sterile fact into a useful and fecund one.”
March, then, without stopping, to the conquest of the honor of the homeland. The men of today can only show you the way. You must reap the fruit of this teaching and prepare a Spain of the future that avenges us for the Spain of the present.
The anguished homeland trusts in you. What would become of it if you did not respond to its tender solicitude, if you showed yourself indifferent to its longings and hopes!
You will perhaps reply that your shoulders are too weak for the immense weight of the burden, that the labor will be harsh, stubborn, feverish. The task is also arduous for the foreigner, and the foreigner undertakes it with vigor and triumphs and dominates. You will have no less ardor than he. Grant me the consolation of supposing you capable of the honorable heroism of work, of thinking that, while awaiting the tomorrow of reparation, you will know how to grow pale before the book, the retort, and the microscope, that you will give no rest to your hand nor truce to your thought until science is enriched with new truths, and the national banner is graced with new blazons.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal Madrid, December 20, 1899
