ABSTRACT
In Mission of the University, Jose Ortega y Gasset departs further from the sinister outlook of his compeers and rejects most of the anti-rational implications of the cyclical theory. After years of unhurried preparation, largely in Spain and in Germany, Ortega was appointed in 1911 to the Chair of Metaphysics at the University of Madrid. He has been an inspiring teacher, whose students were willing to follow him outside the university when he found the atmosphere of its halls too turbulent for scholarship. As a teacher, Ortega has been quite the opposite of the mass-minded educator one might infer him to be from reading Mission of the University by itself. The university falls the responsibility of leadership in the processes requisite for an effective reform of general education: to synthesize the best of our culture, and to make this basis for enlightened living an influence for good throughout all the specialized forms of modern life.
