Ortega as a philosopher has met with opposition from some Catholic circles within the Spanish-speaking world because he not only has apparently forsaken his own Catholic tradition but has ignored religion in his own philosophical scheme. If at most he can be said to have left a place for it, the place is so far unoccupied. It is true that very early in his career Ortega gave up the practice of religion and that at no time has religion in any pietistic way interested him as a topic. It is also true that he has always treated it with respect and he includes the religious sense as one of the five elements in his theory of values. (The others are goodness, beauty, truth and justice.)

This neglect, however, is only superficial and accidental. Ortega’s thought is really profoundly religious and one is inclined to classify him as possessing the truly religious temperament of the artist as against the intellectual or mystic. Indeed, one of the difficulties about Ortega’s philosophy all through is that it is a very subtle system of thought, closely articulated, but mediated through a highly aesthetic temperament. Ortega’s philosophical aim is so fundamental that it is unlikely that he himself will ever arrive at the point of sketching the natural theology proper to it. His object is to change radically the whole approach to knowledge and being by starting from the individual experience of living and, instead of projecting concepts upon, as it were, the screen of the intellect, work to truth within that experience.