 Yet, a more careful look at Wolff’s texts reveals that, rather than representing completely divergent paths, reason and experience are envisioned as forming a complementary whole, where experience provides an indispensable basis for properly philosophical cognition and even serves to confirm the latter’s results. Indeed, the important dependence of philosophical cognition upon experiential cognition is emphasized in Wolff’s later discussion in the Preliminary Discourse. There, Wolff labels the cognition of that which is and which happens historical cognition (DP: §3), and contends that cognition of the reason of that which is or occurs, that is, philosophical cognition (DP: §6), frequently relies on historical cognition as its foundation (fundamenta). This is the case, for instance, when we discover by means of experience something that can serve as the ground for something else that is or occurs (DP: §10). Since that which is known directly through experience is, for Wolff, “firm and unshakeable” (DP: §11), it follows that anyone who strives for philosophical cognition should not neglect the historical, or as Wolff claims, that 