 The first book to which Ortega referred was his Meditations on Quixote (1914), a work of essays he thought propelled philosophical aspirations. According to some commentators, the nucleus of Ortega’s basic philosophical principle—the notion that human life is the ultimate reality—is formulated in the Meditations on Quixote through the instrumentality of his well known expression, “I am I and my circumstances”. A close and critical reading of the Meditations on Quixote and Ortega’s later writings reveals that albeit “I am I and my circumstances” appeared in this early work, we fail to perceive a systematic elaboration of “I am I and my circumstances” as an analytical and ontological statement in his general philosophic point of view before his later works. The psychological interpretation of external and internal excitation, as discussed by Freud in the Outline of Psychoanalysis (1904) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), arrested Ortega’s attention on this new scientific method between 1911 and 1915. Husserl and the phenomenological movement, and Freud and the psychoanalytical movement, presented for Ortega the new “intellectual tendency of our times—subjectivism, or subjectivistic relativism” (Obras, XII: 417). This intellectual tendency became his philosophic concern during the succeeding years. This concern became apparent in his lectures of 1921–22, subsequently published as The Theme of Our Time (1923). For Ortega, the “principal theme of our time”, the essence of which “modernity” had to confront, comprised the concept that “human life is in an eminent degree psychological life” (Obras, III: 152–156).