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which even a modern Spanish historian [176] has described as a gain balancing the economic loss from the expulsion of the Moriscoes, was precisely the condition of minimum intellectual activity--the unity of stagnation. No kind of ratiocinative thought was allowed to raise its head. A Latin translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus had been permitted, or at least published, in Catholic France; but when Martin Martinez de Cantatapiedra, a learned orientalist and professor of theology, ventured to do the same thing in Spain--doubtless with the idea of promoting faith by discouraging reason--he was haled before the Inquisition, and the book proscribed (1583). He was further charged with Lutheran leanings on the score that he had a preference for the actual text of Scripture over that of the commentators. [177] In such an atmosphere it was natural that works on mathematics, astronomy, and physics should be censured as
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[178] It has been held by one historian that at the death of Philip II there arose some such sense of relief throughout Spain as was felt later in France at the death of Louis XIV; that
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; and that Cervantes profited by the change in conceiving and writing his Don Quixote. [179] But the same historian had before seen that
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[180] Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon proved that within the iron wall of Catholic orthodoxy, in an age when conclusions were but slowly being tried between dogma and reason, there could be a vigorous play of imaginative genius on the field of human nature; even as in Velasquez, sheltered by royal favour, the genius of colour and portraiture could become incarnate. But after these have passed away, the laws of social progress are revealed in the defect of all further Spanish genius. Even of Cervantes it is recorded--on very doubtful authority, however--that he said
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I could have made Don Quixote much more amusing if it were not for the Inquisition