y--pass through six stadia, of which the first three
(consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) correspond to the progress
of the intermediate part of the Doctrine of Subjective Spirit, which is
entitled _Phaenomenologie_, and the others (ethical spirit, religion, and
absolute knowledge) give an abbreviated presentation of that which the
Doctrine of Objective and Absolute Spirit develops in richer articulation.

%(a) Logic% considers the Idea in the abstract element of thought, only as
it is thought, and not yet as it is intuited, nor as it thinks itself; its
content is the truth as it is without a veil in and for itself, or God in
his eternal essence before the creation of the world. Unlike common logic,
which is merely formal, separating form and content, speculative logic,
which is at the same time ontology or metaphysics, treats the categories as
real relations, the forms of thought as forms of reality: as thought and
thing are the same, so logic is the theory of thought and of being in one.
Its three principal divisions are entitled _Being, Essence, the Concept_.
The first of these discusses quality, quantity, and measure or qualitative
quantum. The second considers essence as such, appearance, and (essence
appearing or) actuality, and this last, in turn, in the moments,
substantiality, causality, and reciprocity. The third part is divided into
the sections, subjectivity (concept, judgment, syllogism), objectivity
(mechanism, chemism, teleology), and the Idea (life, cognition, the
absolute Idea).

As a specimen of the way in which Hegel makes the concept pass over into
its opposite and unite with this in a synthesis, it will be sufficient to
cite the famous beginning of the _Logic_. How must the absolute first be
thought, how first defined? Evidently as that which is absolutely without
presupposition. The most general concept which remains after abstracting
from every determinate content of thought, and from which no further
abstraction is possible, the most indeterminate and immediate concept, is
pure _being_. As without quality and content it is equivalent to _nothing_.
In thinking pure being we have rather cogitated nothing; but this in turn
cannot be retained as final, but passes back into being, for in being
thought it exists as a something thought. Pure being and pure nothing are
the same, although we mean different things by them; both are absolute
indeterminateness. The transition from being to nothing and