incubation must be due to the fact that, in the meantime, the Geschick of being has taken a turn, presumably in the sense that being as such has awakened and come to the fore. But it is precisely at this point that the end of the incubation period of the prindple of reason does not come to an end. Indeed something in the Geschick of being has taken a turn, but in a totally different sense. For the principle of reason to expressly become sovereign as the supreme fundamental principle, the genuine power of the principle of reason as the principium rationis must first of all be set loose. The sovereignty of the principle of reason begins only now in the obvious sense that all cognition thoroughly responds to the demand that sufficient reasons be unconditionally rendered for every being. Because of this, the possibility of the principle of reason coming to light as a leap into being completely disappeared from view for a long time. Accordingly, we may venture to say that , in the meantime, being qua being still more decisively withdraws as compared to the above-mentioned incubation period of the principle of reason. But now we hear that the withdrawal of being only reigns in such a way that what withdraws simultaneously and directly abides in a shining-forth. This happens because beings as such appear in a new manner according to which they intrude and impose themselves on cognition. Beings appear as objects. Being comes to shine in the objectness of objects. Through a certain reciprocity, the objectness of objects, the Objectivity of Objects comes to have a bearing on the subjectivity of subjects. Being, as the objectness of objects, gets distended [eingespannt] into the relation between cognition and the subject. From then on this relation between subject and Object counts as the sole realm wherein a decision is made about beings regarding their being, the realm wherein a decision about being is always made solely in terms of the objectness of the object but never about being as such. Insofar as being appears in the objectness of the object, it surrenders its determinability to cognition understood in the sense of reflective representation which renders beings to cognition as objects. Thus, for the first time a realm is opened up which is expressly oriented toward the possibility of rendering the ground of beings. And with this one has, for the first time, the possibility of what we call the modern natural sciences and modern technology. The contemporary, often hackneyed battle over the sort and scope of the validity of the principle of causality has whatever footing it has only because those who participate in the battle all stand under the same demand to render sufficient reasons for cognition.
The process determining a new epoch of the withdrawal is one in which being adapts itself to the objectness of objects, but which , in its essence as being, thereby withdraws. This epoch characterizes the innermost essence of the age we call modernity.
So we must say that when the incubation period of the principle of reason came to an end with Leibnizian thinking, the incubation of the principle of reason as it has been known since Leibniz indeed ceases, but in no way does