[3rd Paragraph]
What makes this book different from an ordinary textbook? The method. That means the way it moves from one thought to the next, and how it proves things.
This method is quite its own. Hegel calls it speculative. He explained it in detail in another book, the “Science of Logic.” Here he takes it as given.
Why does this matter so much to him? In his time, philosophy has sunk very low. Many have noticed: the old rules of logic are not enough for philosophy. So they simply threw the rules away, like annoying fetters. Since then they speak from the heart, from the imagination, from whatever just occurs to them. Yet they cannot get by without thinking. So they keep thinking in a quite ordinary way, without noticing it, and badly.
So Hegel asks readers to judge his book above all by this: does its line of thought hold? For in science, the content is bound to the form. Anyone who skips over the form loses the content as well.
Hegel’s text: Preface, paragraph 3 →