 Individual lives are historical. Where human life has a beginning and an end, in view of Ortega’s reading of Hegel, history has neither a first beginning nor a final end. It can only be conceived of as the realization of the potentialities of the individual in historical time. In retracing the individual’s struggle to control nature and in reviving the thoughts and conscious life of the past, historical study offers the contemporary generation the challenge of making its own vital decisions on the basis of critical knowledge of the full scope of former human experiences and achievements. History is understood here in its dual meaning as a factual world of phenomena and as discipline concerned with only its relevance of life in the present.