 By the late 1920s and the early 1930s, however, Ortega did incorporate the idea of human life into his philosophic viewpoint. During these years, he labeled his own philosophy as “the metaphysics of vital reason” to signify his continuous search for a structure of life that would be transcendent in its relation to every existing reality, and yet itself located within the framework of temporal and spatial reality. Like Dilthey, whom he considered “the most important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century”, he denied truth to any constant principle that establishes itself as superior to the flux of life, including that of the physical and biological sciences. Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, which emphasizes openness to experience, not only denies the notion of an abstract transcendental reality, but also considers life to be more than mere biological organism. His concept of life is not biological, and in this sense, Ortega’s notion of human life resembles Dilthey’s. For Ortega, “my life”—in the “biographical” not in the “biological” sense—is the question of what to do with it and that of what happens to me as I find myself “shipwrecked” in the precarious sea of “circumstances”. The individual, from this point of view, saves himself by sinking into the inner depths of his being as he makes an effort to hold on to consciousness and to the very essence of his life. “To live”, he maintained, “is to deal with the world, aim at it, act in it, be occupied with it” (Obras, V: 26, 33–34, 35, 44–45, VII: 103–04). For Dilthey, life is realized empirically within the experiential process of consciousness, as lived experience, which gives the experience of the individual life and reality. Dilthey’s position, like Bergson’s, contains the vitalist viewpoint that our experience of the life of our own minds is a direct experience of that life, as it exists, and therefore cannot be perceived as some mechanistic physiological explanation of human organism or as some subjective neo-idealistic logical principle. The emphasis on the active, dynamic, and historical dimensions of human and social phenomena, as realized within the lived experiences of life, reveal the vitalization of philosophy and the historicization of life perspective that are reflective of historicism and the attitude that historical knowledge is unique to the realm of human affairs.