Faith & Spirit Quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Ortega y Gasset makes metaphor sound less like a decorative literary trick and more like a stolen instrument: a contraband spark of divinity smuggled into human consciousness. The line flatters us, but it also scolds. If metaphor is a “tool for creation,” then ordinary, literal-minded speech is a kind of self-imposed poverty. He’s arguing that humans don’t just describe reality; we actively manufacture intelligibility, dragging the unknown into view by yoking it to what we already grasp. Calling that efficacy “magic” isn’t mystical hand-waving so much as a precise admission: metaphor works before we can fully explain how. It lands in the body, then the mind catches up.

The theological tease - God “forgot” the tool inside us - is classic Ortega: reverent and impudent at once. It frames human imagination as an accidental surplus in the cosmic design, a feature so powerful it almost violates the hierarchy between creator and creature. Subtext: modernity’s great danger isn’t secularism, it’s flatness - the loss of imaginative power to bureaucratic language, technical rationality, and dead concepts.

Context matters. Writing in early 20th-century Europe, Ortega watched old certainties collapse under mass politics, industrial life, and a crisis of culture. Metaphor becomes his defense mechanism against a world that wants everything measurable. In this view, creativity isn’t a luxury; it’s cognition itself. Metaphor is how a person stays more than a function, how a culture avoids becoming a ledger.