 Ortega considered Dilthey one of the “first discoverers” of “the new great Idea of life”, who has “taught us more radically than any of his predecessors—Hegel, Comte—to see historicity as a constitutive feature of the human being” (Obras, VI: 166; IX: 396). After the posthumous publication of Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften in 1928 and Ortega’s subsequent “acquaintance” with Dilthey’s philosophical work, we begin to observe the eventual unfolding of a general systematic statement of human life in Ortega’s philosophy and historical thought. The years surrounding Ortega’s absorption of Dilthey’s writings suggest that he derived from Dilthey a sense of historicity, which he previously had never possessed. He assigned, as did Dilthey, history the task of supplying human life’s only “fixed, pre-established, and given line”, of converting itself into the “historical reason” which secures the one kind of continuous, empirical progress of which the individual is capable. We also observe that, in addition to the influences of historicism and phenomenology, Ortega also integrated existential philosophy into his general philosophical orientation. During the late 1920s and 1930s, of his intellectual development, Ortega incorporated the idea of human life into his fundamental philosophical outlook, and the discernible transition from “vital reason” to “historical reason” occurred in his thought. That is, once human life was established as the basis of his philosophical standpoint, “vital reason” and “historical reason” became interchangeable terms for Ortega (Obras, V: 538, VI: 39–41). Though he spoke of a parallelism between the ideas of Dilthey and his own, during the period 1914 and 1929, and although his insistence on the fact that he discussed the notion of “vial reason” prior to the early 1930s remains accurate, there was no such discussion of “historical reason” in the manner in which one has become familiar with its usage in his mature writings of the 1930s. After the publication of his lectures, What Is Philosophy? (1929) and his essay on Dilthey, “life” and “reason” and “vital reason”—or “living reason”—and “historical reason” were central concepts in the fusion of his systematic analysis of man, society and history. Through the influence of the basic idea of Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, Ortega was able to link his ontological point of view with his existentialist and historicist viewpoints. The correlation of these concepts, which placed a common emphasis upon the actions and the creations of the individual, the facticity and the uniqueness of individual human existence, makes explicit Ortega’s connectedness to Lebensphilosophie: “ Life”, Dilthey averred, “ is the inner relationship of mental processes within a person. Knowledge of life is growing awareness of, and reflection on, life.” (Dilthey [1976: 125]). “The significance of life,” he contended further, “lies in its shaping and its development.” (Dilthey [1962: 88]. Existential philosophy, in a variety of ways, had been an outgrowth of Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology, and Ortega, with the complement of the historicist viewpoint of the “unique individual” and of “human life” as the ultimate reality, appears to have pursued the path which had been directed by both Dilthey and Heidegger (Misch 1931: 5–197, 216–37).