 In June 1908 Ortega was appointed professor of ethics, logic and psychology at La Escuela Superior del Magisterio (Normal School), which he had helped found. In late October, at the Assembly for the Progress of Science held in Zaragoza, he spoke vehemently in favor of regenerating Spain by broadening her horizons within European thought. Ortega pursued these issues with his former professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno, but reproached him for preferring to “Africanize” Europe than to “Europeanize” Spain, a conviction that led to a parting of ways the following year (Obras, I: 64). On October 8, 1910, in an open competition, Ortega appeared before a jury established to select a successor to the chair of metaphysics, left vacant after the death of Nicolás Salmerón (1838–1908). A month later, he received the professorship at the Central University of Madrid, at the remarkable age of twenty-seven. Six months earlier, on April 7, 1910, Ortega married his fiancée, Rosa Spottorno y Topete, and from January to October 1911, the couple spent a delayed honeymoon in Germany, assisted by a grant issued through the Ministry of Public Education for further study and research. His first son, Miguel Germán, was born in Marburg on May 28, 1911. The symbolic name reveals the importance of Cervantes and Germany for Ortega. At the end of December 1911, Ortega returned to Madrid to assume his teaching duties, and in January 1912, took up the position of professor of metaphysics, a chair he occupied for twenty-four years, with only two brief interruptions: once in 1929, when he resigned to protest the encroachments on academic freedom during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera; and again, in 1931, when Ortega become one of the first members of the Constituent Cortes at the beginning of the second Spanish Republic until he was exiled from Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.