Definition of "ascertainment"

You have a great Worke to doe, to restore Religion and Law, upon which depends the Kings re-enthronement, and re-investure with his just rights, the Parliaments ascertainment of their just power and equall Priviledges, and the peoples restorement to their known Liberties and Properties […]

1647, anonymous author, A Letter Really Written by a Moderate Cavallier to an Intelligent and Moderate Independent of Trust and Credit in the Now Marching Army‎, London, page 6

[…] Mr. Pope himself appears to me […] now and then to have imagin’d Proprieties, or cover’d Defects with a seeming View rather to the Honour of his Author at all Events, than to the precise Ascertainment of Truth.

1758, William Hawkins, Tracts in Divinity‎, volume 2, Oxford, page 321

[…] I judged it proper that there should be an exact ascertainment of my legal rights by the decree of a court of justice,

1819, Walter Scott, chapter 1, in The Bride of Lammermoor‎, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, page 15

[…] does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest?

1860, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss‎, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, Volume 2, Book 4, Chapter 1, p. 151

[…] what we ought to aim at is less the ascertainment of resemblances and differences than the recognition of likenesses hidden under apparent divergences.

1974, Robert M[aynard] Pirsig, chapter 22, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, New York, N.Y.: William Morrow & Company, part 3, page 266