Miguel de Unamuno

THE history of Ideas is still terra incognita on our map of the Latin American world. We are aware of certain European influences on the Hispanic American people, such as the Spanish mystics, Rousseau and the French romanticists, or Comte and his school of thought. But few comprehensive studies of Latin American thought exist. Not even the impact of Spanish philosophy has been fully evaluated. Although we know that the representative thinkers of the generation of 1898, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Luis de Zulueta and others were widely read, we know little of their effect on the writings of Alfonso Reyes, B. Sanin Cano, Francisco Romero and Jose Carlos Mariategui, to mention only some outstanding examples. Yet Unamuno was deeply interested in Latin American problems and his comments on Bolivar, Sarmiento and Latin American literature command our attention. Many critics recognize this significant relationship. Rafael Heliodoro Valle, for instance, remarks: “No cabe duda de que Unamuno ha sido el escritor espanol que mas curiosidad intelectual ha tenido hacia nosotros.”