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The method according to which the Concept develops itself out of itself in science, and which is only an immanent progression and production of its determinations—a progression that does not happen through the assurance that various relations exist, nor through the application of the universal to such material taken up from elsewhere—is here likewise presupposed from Logic.

The moving principle of the Concept, as not only dissolving but also producing the particularizations of the universal, I call Dialectic—dialectic, therefore, not in the sense that it dissolves, confuses, or leads back and forth an object, proposition, etc., given to feeling or to immediate consciousness in general, and is concerned only with deriving its opposite—a negative mode such as frequently appears even in Plato. It may regard the opposite of a representation as its final result, or, like the ancient Skepticism, its contradiction, or even, in a duller fashion, an approximation to the truth—a modern half-measure. The higher dialectic of the Concept consists in not merely producing and grasping the determination as a limit and opposite, but in producing and grasping the positive content and result out of it; for through this alone is it development and immanent progression. This dialectic, then, is not the external doing of a subjective thinking, but the own soul of the content, which organically puts forth its branches and fruits. Subjective thinking, as such, merely looks on at this development of the Idea as the proper activity of its reason, without adding any ingredient of its own. To consider something rationally does not mean to bring a reason to the object from the outside and thus to work upon it, but rather the object is rational for itself; here it is spirit in its freedom, the highest peak of self-conscious reason, which gives itself reality and generates itself as an existing world; the only business of science is to bring this proper work of the reason of the matter to consciousness.

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