 The historical nature of human reality and social thought sheds light on Ortega’s notion that “there is no spontaneous generation”, for the “series of the generations” function through the continuity of the historical process. Social thought and ideas of individuals reflect “the minds of men” together with the particular generations within which they develop and, if constituted as “coming from” and “going toward”, they become part and parcel of the “happening” of the historical process (Obras, VI: 202–4). As we have seen, man’s being-in-the-making, for Ortega, “is in man mere happening, happening to him” and, accordingly, a happening toward the future: the present evolves out of the past and, as the reality exigent to man, veers toward the future (Obras, VI: 37, 40–41). This historical sense of continuity between the minds of men and the succession of generations recalls for us Ortega’s assertion that the individual cannot live solely within the isolation of his ego (whether he is a “mass” or a “select” man). Social thought in general, and individuals’ ideas in particular, fail to develop and expand within the solipsistic vacuum of the “I” by their very essence. As a being of the social world, the individual and his ideas are influenced by the historical context and the very social world within which they emerged, and, similarly, formed by the past. From this perspective, man, time, thought and society are disclosed in reality as being essentially historical. For Ortega, the individual is not born in some general place and moment; rather, he or she is born in a particular moment in time and at a particular place in space. Human life has a beginning and an end and, on entering the world, man enters a social world that is given to him in conjunction with the historical process of its temporal dimension. As we saw, for Ortega, “man has no nature…what he has is history” for, he says, “man is the entity that makes itself…the causa sui”. (Obras, VI: 33). History, then, provides the process through which the essence of man becomes manifest both as an individual and a social being. As an individual being, man undergoes the stream of consciousness of an internal occurrence as a historical process; as a being-that-lives-in-the-world, man experiences the succession of generations as an external occurrence within the historical process. Ortega posited the “theme of history” and “historical thought” as proceeding “with respect to the human phenomena” through the prisms of these internal and external occurrences. History, through the succession of generations, not only provides us with the basic features of the individual at a particular time and place, but also provides us with “a regulative principle” of coherence for human phenomena. The unity of the past and the present in history, for Ortega, constitutes a reality which becomes identified with the experiences of individuals. Like Croce, Ortega perceived history qua history as being “contemporary” and “living”, whereas mere facts are relegated to the realm of “dead chronicle”. Through the relationship of history to life, he defined history, as contrasted with chronicle, by its vitality and present-mindedness rather than by connectedness as such, though he did acknowledge that those who defined it by the latter quality pursued the correct path. The contemporaneity of history, then, proffers a dynamic process that is ever changing and continuously absorbed by the past. The relations that past events bear to other events and to the present are significant in that they are continually changing and, according to Ortega, the function of the philosopher becomes not only to describe and analyze the past but also to attempt to understand these relations in conjunction with human life. The underlying concept of the individual ultimately determines the critical character of historical interpretations, which results from both a reading of the past and simultaneous self-analysis by the observer. In this critical revival of the past, the contemporary generation achieves a higher historical consciousness of its own being. Internal consciousness of temporal change within the individual coupled with an awareness of the external manifestations of change in the social world of human reality dispose one to see how Ortega’s concept of the generation constitutes a concept of historical methodology: