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and Scheler, no less than against the "existence philosophy" of
Heidegger. Whether he has succeeded, or will succeed, in founding,
developing and effectively defending the system of vital reason, I
do not know. I could not and would not live without philosophy,
but I am not a philosopher and I do not desire to be one. I am a
historian and critic. My subject is literature, and philosophical
literature forms a part of it. My vital reason puts me in the role of an
observer. And from that standpoint I follow the course of Ortega's
thought with passionate interest.
During the last decade it has not been easy to follow him. The
political earthquake out of which arose the second World War
reached Spain too. The Spanish civil war sent Ortega into exile,
first to Paris, then to Argentina. He went into exile, but-be it noted
-not as a partisan of Red Spain, but as a non-partisan, outlawed by
both parties. The post-war years he spent in Portugal. Recently he
returned to Madrid, to found a free institute of philosophy and
cultural science. Some of his books, it is true, were published in Ger–
many even during the second World War. But a comparison with
the originals reveals that certain passages, intolerable for the Ger–
many of those years, were omitted. Ortega somewhere refers to "the
bestiality of our time," which nothing in the past equals. Th;tt could
not be printed in Germany in 1943, although even Grillparzer had
put the course of the nineteenth century into the formula: "From
humanity through nationality to bestiality." From 1944 to 1948 we
were cut off from Spain, intellectually and postally. Yet now and
again a new book of Ortega's came in-from Switzerland or the
United States. But it will be some time yet before we can read all
that he has written in recent years.
The polarity "reason-life" determined the thought of the
young Ortega. But in 1929 he became acquainted with the writings
of Wilhelm Dilthey. He devoted four years to studying them. This late
encounter with Dilthey cost Ortega, he says, ten years of his life.
I take this to mean that in Dilthey, Ortega found a historical and
philosophical consideration of the intellectual world which would
have saved him many detours. His essay on Dilthey is dated 1933.
In the same year appeared a book "On the Nature of Historical
Crises." In 1935 there followed another on "History as System." In
other words: Ortega's philosophy is turning to a new, vast theme-
