To dream! To the heritage of idealism left by our forebears should be added a new ideal, or the power of bringing it about.
Ferragut realized that in normal times, he would have gone to his death just as he had lived, continuing a monotonous and uniform existence.
Now the violent changes around him were resuscitating the dormant personalities which we all carry within us as souvenirs of our ancestors, revolving around a central and keen personality the only one that has existed until then.
The world was in a state of war.

The men of Middle Europe were clashing with the other half on the battlefields.

Both sides had a mystic ideal, affirming it with violence and slaughter just as the multitudes have always done when moved by religious or revolutionary certainty accepted as the only truth....
But the sailor recognized a profound difference in the two masses struggling at the present day.

One was placing its ideal in the past, wishing to rejuvenate the sovereignty of Force, the divinity of war, and adapt it to actual life.

The other throng was preparing for the future, dreaming of a world of free democracy, of nations at peace, tolerant and without jealousy.
Upon adjusting himself to this new atmosphere, Ferragut began to feel within him ideas and aspirations that were, perhaps, an ancestral legacy.