reason, a principle which is only later expressly posited. It only gradually dawns on humans that they stand and fall in the train of the principle of reason.
To the extent that human cognition reflects on the fact that in some manner it always gets to the bottom and founds everything, the principle of reason resounds in human cognition as the motive of its conduct.[1] We say with caution: the principle of reason resounds. This principle is by no means as easily and straightforwardly put into words as one would like to suppose on the basis of its contents. Even where human cognition embarks upon a reflection on its own proper activity and fosters this reflection; even where this reflection rises up to what was, for a long time, identified with the Greek word φιλοσοφία; even in philosophy the principle of reason has just begun to resound, and this for some time now. Centuries were needed for the principle of reason to be stated as a principle. The short formulation mentioned earlier speaks in Latin. This formulation of the principle of reason was first mentioned and specifically discussed in the course of those meditations Leibniz carried out in the seventeenth century.1
In the West , however, philosophy has been reigning and transforming itself ever since the sixth century BC. Hence it took two thousand three hundred years until Western European thinking actually discovered and formulated the simple principle of reason.
How odd that such an obvious principle, which always directs all human cognition and conduct without being stated, needed so many centuries to be expressly stated as a principle in the formulation cited above. But it is even odder that we never wonder about the slowness with which the principle of reason came to light. One would like to call the long time it needed for this its "incubation period": two thousand three hundred years for the positing [Setzen] of this simple principle [Satz]. Where and how did the principle of reason sleep for so long and presciently dream what is unthought in it? It is not yet the correct moment to ponder this. It is likely that we are still not awake enough to take in the oddity we would encounter if, for once, we began to give due attention to the uncommonly long incubation period of the principle of reason.
At first we find nothing provocative about it. Now, the statementlike formulation of the principle has already once remained unformulated for a long time. And when the principle was finally stated, apparently nothing essential changed in the course of thinking. So why all the amazement about the odd history of the principle of reason? Let us not kid ourselves. The principle of reason and its history hardly entice us to linger over it. We already have plenty of things that provoke us: the discovery of new elements in the natural sciences, the discovery of new kinds of clocks that can calculate the age of the earth, a book about Gods, Gravediggers, and Scholars,2 or news about the construction of space ships.