Among the organisms of great importance at this time, it is possible to emphasize the Free Institution of Education, founded in Madrid in 1876 by the university professor and thinker Francisco Giner de los Ríos.
The plastic writers and artists agreed in the negation, and even an officially conservative man like Antonio Gaudí projected in unusual architectures his escapist deliriums (arabicism of the Vicens House, in Barcelona, or purified gothicism of the Episcopal Palace of Astorga).
Indigenism and exotism were not negative attitudes: they implied the affirmation of the inhabitable world; even more, of myths in which close truths of universal validity were declared.
The Pythagorism of the Modernists comprises an inclination to the esoteric doctrines, shown in their interest for the hidden things and in a desire or restlessness for communicating with the afterlife, expressed already in 1895 by one of its eminent precursors: Gérard de Nerval.
The so-called declining Literature familiarized them with the occultism, and Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Horacio Quiroga, Pío Baroja, among others, wrote narrations in which the action of the strange forces is described.
Also the mysticism of the Modernists is interesting, orthodox or heterodox, but rarely free of eroticism, associated to the erotic impulse of giving oneself to the other, to surrender.
The eroticism approaches other times the violence and the blood, like with Valle-Inclán and Rodríguez Larreta; The glory of Don Ramiro is perhaps the most extreme culmination of such associations, that in poetry were registered in unforgettable verses of Rubén Darío.
It does not have to be understood that between the one and other there is an unsalvable border; on the contrary, if in some modernist writers, like José Santos Chocano and Guillermo Valencia, the cult to the form predominates, in others, like Leopoldo Lugones and Antonio Machado, a preference for the intimism can be seen.
Divided, in struggle with the others and with themselves, denying with the reason what the feeling postulates, the top figures of the Modernism, who better represented it (Rubén Darío or Miguel de Unamuno) lived in anguish, if not in desperation.