 To explain reality, Ortega continued, the natural sciences, in their concern with the existence of objects in natural phenomena, aim at discovering the general concepts or the natural laws under which these objects may be subsumed. In order to understand the relationship between human life and reality, therefore, the individual must escape from what he labels, “the terrorism of the laboratory”. Through his various readings of Kant, Ortega learned that the autonomous mind must liberate the self from the enslavement of our empirical existence by nature. To avert compounding the ontological distinctions he thought should be made between a philosophy of physical nature and a philosophy of human nature, Ortega maintained that “man has no nature”. The individual must liberate himself or herself from the shackles of the natural scientists for the latter are too involved with general, abstract concepts of nature, and “man has no nature”. In this sense, according to Ortega, the generalized interpretations of the natural scientists exclude the most essential element of human reality: the life of the individual. In denaturalizing “man”, a question still remains for us: if the individual has no nature, what does he or she have? “Man has history” Ortega replies. “Man lives”, he continues, and, as a “living being”, the individual relates to other “living beings” so that vital, operative factors are set in motion—the “living experience of man”. Ortega’s departure from physics and mathematics’ universal perspective of reality shows us that his dictum, “man, in word, has no nature; what he has is …history”, completes the alienation of the individual from nature and nature from the individual. This abrupt separation of individual and nature, in addition to his rejection of rational concepts as producing any valid knowledge of reality, reaffirms Ortega’s denial of universal, fundamental principles of reality and thus aligns him on the humanistic side of the natural sciences—human sciences dichotomy. What is real and what has history comprises what has been disclosed by human beings. History, therefore, “sensu stricto” constitutes “human history”. For history “is the reality of man. He has no other. Through history he has made himself such as he is”. Ortega’s later emphasis on the “original autochthonous” basis of “historical reason”, insisted both on the systematic quality of history and on the “transcendent” character of physical reason (Obras, IX: 83–86, 88–89). To Ortega, human life is “not a thing” but “a drama”; human life “is a gerund, not a participle: a faciendum, not a factum”. Finally, as expressed differently by Collingwood: “what nature is to things, history, as res gestae, is to man…. Man finds that he has no nature other than what he has done himself”. For Collingwood, history is the study of “res gestae: actions of human beings done in the past”; and, because it studies human activity, it is the study of purposive activity (Obras, VI: 32–33, 41; Collingwood 1948 [1956: 9]; 1921 [1966:19–20]).