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Article: Reason
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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REASON
REASON.
For many in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reason was understood as "right reason." It was a human faculty, divinely founded, that uncovered the world by revealing it, because it was part of the world. Reason was an ontological property of a divinely ordered cosmos, an innate virtue that directed right behavior and served as the source for civil and social law and order. It was not an introspective activity separate from, and thus searching for, certain laws and principles about the world. This it was to become over the next two centuries as epistemology became separated from ontology, as knowing became separated from the world to be known. During this ...