 In late February 1905, Ortega left Spain for Germany “fleeing”, he described later, “the vulgarity of my country to stuff myself with whatever I can get out of it” (El Imparcial, 19 January, 1908, p. 1; Obras, X: 24). This first trip to Germany resulted in an eight-month stay at the University of Leipzig where he pursued the study of classical philology and philosophy. Ortega’s proficiency in German proved inadequate to study philology, but this linguistic deficiency did not deter his enthusiasm: he enrolled in the Indo-European language and linguistic courses taught by professors Brugmann and Meyer. Although the time devoted to philological studies somewhat distracted him from the philosophical training he sought initially, Ortega was introduced to the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin, and audited anatomy, physiology and psychology courses of Wilhelm Wundt who, despite having been appointed the chair of philosophy, served as professor of physiology and psychology at Leipzig. He returned to Madrid in the summer of 1906, where he received word that he had been granted a state stipend to resume his study in Germany for another year. Within a few weeks, he left for the University of Berlin, where Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Paulsen, Eduard Meyer, Heinrich Wölfflin, Georg Simmel, Carl Stumpf, Max Planck, and Alois Riehl were teaching. However, Ortega only attended Riehl’s lectures while in Berlin, which he later came to regret as he missed the opportunity to encounter two thinkers he would subsequently admire: Dilthey and Simmel. Six months later, Ortega left Berlin for the University of Marburg, where he began his philosophical studies, joining Nicolai Hartmann, Paul Scheffer, and Heinz Heimsoeth under the Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Once ensconced in “the citadel of Neo-Kantianism” (Obras, VIII: 32), Ortega studied Kant and the history of philosophy with Cohen and psychology and pedagogy with Natorp. The University of Marburg, with its inquiry into the logical foundation of the natural sciences and its emphasis on the epistemological and methodological facets of philosophy, provided Ortega with the kind of philosophical grounding and training he had been seeking.