And why does the determination of the essence of thought not take place in terms of those things that are evoked in the sphere of these words thanc, "memory," "thanks"—particularly since what these words designate was in its essential profundity by no means unknown to the Greeks? The differences in the essential sources of thinking to which we have alluded do not, then, inhere in any way in the distinctive linguistic designations. Rather, the one and only thing that is decisive for what even still for us constitutes the basic character of thinking—the λέγειν of the λόγος, the proposition, the judgment—is that call by which thinking has been called, and is still being called, into its long-habituated nature.

When we raise the second question, what do we understand by thinking according to the prevailing doctrine, it looks at first as though we were merely seeking historical information about what view of the nature of thinking had come to predominate and is still in force. But if we ask the second question qua second question, that is, in the unitary context of the four modes of which we spoke, then ask it ineluctably in the sense of the decisive fourth question. Then the question runs: what is the calling that has directed and is still directing us into thinking in the sense of the predicative λόγος?

This question is no longer historical—in the sense of narrative history—though it is an historic question. But it is not historic in the sense that it represents some occurrence as a chain of events in the course of which various things are brought about—among them this, that thinking after the manner of the λόγος achieved validity and currency. The question: "What call has directed the mode of thinking to the λέγειν of the λόγος?," is an historic, perhaps the historic question, though in the sense that it determines our destiny. It asks what it is that destines our nature to think according to the λόγος, that directs it there, and there turns