 This sympathetic discussion of Husserl’s Ideas inspired Ortega to pursue the new science of phenomenology as a method of inquiry. This method of inquiry became crucial especially in view of his expressed objective to make a distinction between descriptive and explanatory psychology and, thereby, to clarify the concept of the mental status of consciousness. After the 1912 paper and a paper delivered at the Fourth Congress of the Spanish Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913 on “Sensation, Construction and Intuition”, he presented a series of lectures for the course, “Systematic Psychology”, in 1915. Ortega expanded these lectures into a manuscript entitled Psychological Investigations, which has been published posthumously. These psychological investigations constituted for him a philosophical basis upon which to define mental phenomena, very much in the manner Husserl had set out to perform in his Logical Investigations. Inspired by Franz Brentano’s reformist vision of philosophy as an exact science, Husserl adopted the viewpoint of his mentor to posit philosophy as a “rigorous science”. Husserl’s early work on presupposition-less descriptive psychology was also concerned with Brentano’s concept of presentation and the intentional inexistence of an object. Following Brentano and Carl Stumpf, he regarded the essential nature of psychic acts as having content and, normally, an object. In the First Edition of the Logical Investigations, 1900–1901, Husserl understood Phenomenology to mean “descriptive psychology”, which had its origins in Brentano’s earlier efforts. At the turn of the twentieth century, the emergence of psychology as an independent discipline, liberated from the traditional tutelage of philosophy, led to intense investigations of human behavior which soon revealed the need for subtler methods of analysis than those provided by the physical sciences. Gradually, a new conception of the individual emerged, different from the traditional conceptions as new mathematical physics was different from its mechanistic predecessor.