ORTEGA
271
life and reason. The formula which should solve it was to be the
concept of vital reason. Immediate life then revealed itself as an
aspect of history. The task now became: a system of historical
reason. But what place is science to have in human thought? What
is the physical world? Does it affect the reality of our existence? Not
at all. Physics is a conceptual system, which perhaps has a certain
relation to reality, but which is first of all a construction of thought.
These thoughts are not a matter of reality, and reality is not a
matter of thought. Therefore the physicist lives in a world of ideas
constructed by himself. His relation to it is like that of a reader to
the imaginary world of the novel he is reading. We call such a
world a "poetic world." It is a product of imagination, an "inner
world." But is physics any different? Its concepts are intellectual con–
structions. Physics, philosophy, poetry, religion-they are all inner
worlds, creations of the imagination which, according to Ortega, is
the "principal organ" of our intellectual apparatus. The world of
perception, then, is but one of the many inner worlds which man has
produced. What are the relations between these worlds, and in
what do these worlds consist? These are questions which will hardly
be asked. Yet their solution would be of the greatest importance.
Ortega clearly formulated the problem fifteen years ago. Anyone
at all conversant with the history of philosophy will recognize that he
is dealing with problems which had already arisen in the thought of
Hegel and Schelling. Ortega earlier attacked philosophic idealism
in all its forms, he scoffed at the "knights of the spirit." But this
system of inner worlds which creative imagination produces out of
itself is, in other terms, exactly what Hegel called "objective spirit."
There are inescapable philosophical problems. They signify the meet–
ing of mind with itself.
Everything that Ortega has yet written is programmatic. It is
stimulating and provisional. Will he weave the many threads he has
started into a single web? That is the question we address to him.
(Translated trom the German
by
Willard R . Trask )
