 During the second half of the nineteenth century and the fist decades of the twentieth, Vives was read and studied by philosophers such as Ernest Renan (1823–1892), Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), and José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). Lange regards him as one of the most important reformers of philosophy of his time and a precursor of both Bacon and Descartes. According to Ortega y Gasset, Vives’ method, firmly based on experience, and his emphasis on the need to found a new culture grounded, not in barren speculation, but in the usefulness of knowledge, anticipate some elements of the modern Zeitgeist.