The science tree

The tree of knowledge (fragments) Pío Baroja
The whole of Spain, and Madrid especially, lived in an environment of absurd optimism. Everything Spanish was the best. This natural tendency to lie, to the illusion of the poor country that isolates itself, contributed to stagnation, to the fossilization of ideas. That atmosphere of immobility, of falsehood, was reflected in the chairs. Andrés Hurtado was able to verify this when he began to study medicine. The preparatory year teachers were very old; there were some who had been explaining for nearly fifty years. Without a doubt, they were not retired because of their influences and because of that sympathy and respect that there has always been in Spain for the useless.

The scientific dictatorship that Andrés intended to exercise was not recognized at home. He many times he told the old maid that she swept the room to leave the windows open for the sun to come in; but the maid did not obey him.
"Why are you closing the room?" She, ”she asked him once. I want it to be open. Hey you?

The maid barely knew Spanish, and after a confused chat she replied that she closed the room so that the sun would not enter.
"If I want precisely that," Andres told him. Have you heard of microbes?
"I, no, sir."
"Haven't you heard that there are germs... some kind of living things that are in the air that cause disease?"
"Living things in the air?" It will be the flies.
-Yes; they are like flies, but they are not flies.
-Not; Well, I have not seen them.
—No, if they don't see each other; but they exist. Those living things are in the air, in the dust, on the furniture... and those living things, which are bad,
die with the light... Have you understood? "Yes, yes, sir."
"That's why you have to leave the windows open... for the sun to enter.
Indeed; the next day the windows were closed, and the old maid told the others that the Señorito was crazy, because he said that there were flies in the air that were not seen and that he killed Sun.

Within days of arriving in Madrid, Andrés was met with the unpleasant surprise that war was going to be declared on the United States. There were riots, demonstrations in the streets, patriotic music at full blast... Everywhere there was talk of nothing but the possibility of success or failure. Hurtado's father believed in Spanish victory; but in an effortless victory; the Yankees, who were all bacon sellers, when they saw the first Spanish soldiers, they would lay down their weapons and run... The newspapers were saying nothing but nonsense and bravado... Andrés was outraged by the indifference of the people when they heard the news (the defeat). At least he had believed that the Spaniard, inept for science and civilization, was an exalted patriot and he found that he was not; After the disaster of the two small Spanish squads in Cuba and in the Philippines, everyone went to the theater and to the bulls so calmly; those demonstrations and screams had been foam, straw smoke, nothing.