 In this connection, Ortega was in accord with Croce’s notion that “we know that history is in all of us and that its sources are in our breasts”. According to this notion, the recordings of “chronicle’s dead data” of the past fail to register the reality of history and human life, which is the “vital”, living action of the present, and one with the past and the future. History characterizes what we are, instead of something that we possess. Through history we learn who we are by examining what we have done. In view of this position that we are what we have done, history shapes itself in and through ourselves (Obras, VII: 178–79).