On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient...

But, even in a narrower sense, thinking does not consist in the bare presence of abstract conceptions in our consciousness, but rather in connecting or separating two or more of these conceptions under sundry restrictions and modifications which Logic indicates in the Theory of Judgments. A relation of this sort between conceptions distinctly thought and expressed we call a judgment. Now, with reference to these judgments, the Principle of Sufficient Reason here once more holds good, yet in a widely different form from that which has been explained in the preceding chapter; for here it appears as the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing, principium rationis sufficientis cognoscendi. As such, it asserts that if a judgment is to express knowledge of any kind, it must have a sufficient reason: in virtue of which quality it then receives the predicate true. Thus truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself, called its reason or ground, which reason, as we shall presently see, itself admits of a considerable variety of kinds. As, however, this reason is invariably a something upon which the judgment rests, the German term for it, viz., Grund, is not ill chosen. In Latin, and in all languages of Latin origin, the word by which a reason of knowledge is designated, is the same as that used for the faculty of Reason (ratiocinatio): both are called ratio, la ragione, la razon, la raison, the reason. From this it is evident, that attaining knowledge of the reasons of judgments had been recognised as Reason's highest function, its business κατ' ἐξοχήν.