 Ortega’s perspectivist doctrine, as a synthetic principle, also implied for him a doctrine by which one may “attempt to order the world from the point of view of life” (Obras, III: 179). The principle of human life, which constituted the reality of human experience, became the philosophical category through which Ortega synthesized the universe. Correspondingly, the “sign of the times” also pointed to the important role played by Nietzsche, Croce, Dilthey and Heidegger, as well as Freud and Husserl, in the formation of twentieth-century thought. The emphasis placed upon the vital world of life took Ortega a step beyond the Neo-Kantian transcendental logic of Cohen. Ortega combined his idea of human life with an emphasis on history as constituting the vital dynamics of its expression, and this viewpoint carried him closer to the humanistic side of the Naturwissenschaften-Geisteswissenschaften distinction made by the Southwest German or Baden School and Dilthey than to Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism.