 Hence historical time carves the essence of individual configurations. For Ortega, “historical reason” perceives and registers the tangible facts of historical reality through the demonstrative process of how the present originated from the past in order to engender the future. By the term “historical reason”, Ortega intended to make a clearer distinction between the “cultural sciences” and the “natural sciences” to namely posit the notion that history has its “autochthonous” reason; history remains in a realm entirely its own. Ortega’s notion of history’s “autochthonous” reason establishes for history its autonomy from both the abstract concepts of philosophy and the logic of “physico-mathematical reason”. His invocation of history as humanity’s appropriate science, and his overt emphasis on the “original, autochthonous” basis of “historical reason”, point to his insistence on the systematic quality of history and on the “transcendent” character of physical and mathematical reason. History becomes autonomous in that history alone consists of the essence of human reality, and historical knowledge provides us with the essential understanding of this human reality. Every concept “claiming to represent human reality”, he explains, “every concept referring to human life, specifically, is a function of historical time” (Obras, VI: 40–41). In conjunction with the historicization of the individual, historical reason became the medium that circumscribed and eventually supplanted physical and mathematical reason as the unitary principle of ultimate reality: human life, and thereby “historical reason” was now viewed as possessing, at once, the principle of diversity and unity. Hence, history was rationalized and reason was historicized, as with the individual: