José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish essayist and philosopher, was born in Madrid of a patrician family. He was educated at a Jesuit college near Málaga and at the University of Madrid, where he received a doctorate in philosophy in 1904. Ortega spent the next five years at German universities in Berlin and Leipzig and at the University of Marburg, where he became a disciple of the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. Appointed professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid in 1910, he taught there until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. During those years he was also active as a journalist and as a politician. In 1923 he founded the Revista de occidente, a review and series of books that was instrumental in bringing Spain into touch with Western, and particularly German, thought. Ortega's work...