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had a long-standing dispute with Spain over
claims to the area, also did their best to thwart
the project. Orellana and his men finally
reached South America in 1546, but over-
whelmed by a series of diseases and disasters,
both the leader and his band of adventurers
perished without achieving their reward.
Some chroniclers of the Spanish con-
quest of the Americas denounce Orellana
for betraying his word to Gonzalo Pizarro
and dishonorably abandoning his colleagues
in their misery. For those who ranked
“honor” as the highest virtue his offense
was unquestionable. Orellana himself con-
tended that he could not sail back upstream
against the current and rightly chose to
serve the greater interest of Spain by press-
ing on into the unknown. However one
judges the rectitude of his actions, he
achieved one of the greatest voyages in his-
tory by sailing down virtually the entire
length of the Amazon—the first European
do do so—and essentially crossing the South
American continent from the Pacific to the
Atlantic, a true epic of discovery.
tries and A
RGENTINA
. Returning to Spain in
1945, he established the Institute of Human-
ities in Madrid three years later and resumed
his magisterial role until his death in 1955.
Ortega y Gasset moved away from the
neo-Kantian idealism and the abstract philo-
sophical principles of his German training
fairly early in his career. He advocated
instead a more pragmatic relationship
between personal circumstances and philo-
sophical judgments. Far from being narrowly
concerned with lofty issues of theory and
morality, he wrote frequently on the great
questions that bedeviled Western society
from the 1930s through the 1950s, fre-
quently addressing problems of political
organizations, social relations, and interna-
tional affairs. One of his most notable series
of essays,
La rebelión de las masas
(
The Revolt of
the Masses,
1930), argued that the disruption
of the traditional class structure in Europe
(and elsewhere) threatened the good order
and stability of civilization. He urged the pri-
macy of an educated intellectual class that
possessed both the intelligence and the sense
of the general good that the masses did not.
Viewed as a defense of antidemocratic ideas,
Ortega's essay has been praised by political
groups toward whom he apparently had no
personal sympathy. Arguments both before
and after his death, for instance, pitted vari-
ous factions within the Roman Catholic
Church against one another because they
saw Ortega as an apologist or as an opponent
of Catholic ideology. He did not, it would
seem, have any strong religious motivation
but, like many Spaniards who saw them-
selves as citizens of the world, could not
avoid being identified with one camp or
another. The ideas expressed in the
La
rebelión de las masas
are quite similar to those
contained in
España invertebrada
(
Invertebrate
Ortega y Gasset, José
(1883-1955)
Spanish philosopher and essayist
Following a family tradition of intellectual
activity Ortega y Gasset earned a doctorate
in philosophy at the University of Madrid in
his 21st year and pursued postgraduate stud-
ies at several German universities in the
early 1900s. By 1910 he was back in M
ADRID
,
where he was awarded a professorship of
metaphysics. During the next 25 years he
lectured, wrote, and took part in the estab-
lishment of a number of intellectual periodi-
cals. He chose to leave Spain at the beginning
of the S
PANISH
CIVIL
WAR
and spent most of
the next decade in various European coun-
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