We have now become familiar with two expressions of the dialectical method, the positive and the negation. We have seen the first two stages of the process of growth in thought and in reality. The process is not yet complete. It still requires a third stage. This third step Hegel called the Negation of the Negation. With the continued operation of the negation, a new thing or being comes into existence. To revert to our examples: the complete cooling and condensation of the earth's crust: the rise of the middle-class State: the victory of the Proletariat: these things represent the suspension or the setting aside of the Negation; the contradiction is thus resolved, and a new stage in the process of evolution is reached. The expressions Positive (or affirmation), Negation, and Negation of the Negation, are also known as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In order to understand this more distinctly, and to visualise it, let us consider an egg. It is something positive, but it contains a germ, which, awakening to life, gradually consumes (i.e., negatives) the contents of the egg. This negation is, however, no mere destruction and annihilation; on the contrary, it results in the germ developing into a living thing. The negation being complete, the chick breaks through the egg shell. This represents the negation of the negation, whereby there has arisen something organically higher than an egg. This mode of procedure in human thinking and in the operations of nature and history Hegel called the dialectical method, or the dialectical process. It is evident that the dialectic is at the same time a method of investigation and a philosophy. Hegel outlines his dialectic in the following words: "The only thing which is required for scientific progress, an elementary principle for the understanding of which one should really strive, is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much a positive, or that the contradictory does not resolve into nothing, into an abstract nothingness, but actually only into the negation of a special content.... In so far as the resultant, the negation, is a definite negation, it has a content. It is a new conception, but a higher and richer conception than the preceding one; for it has been enriched by the negation or antithesis of this; it therefore contains it and more than contains it, being indeed the synthetic unity of itself and its contrary. In this way the system of concepts has to be formed--and is to be perfected by a continual and purely intellectual process which is independent of outside influences."--(Hegel, "Science of Logic" (German), Bk. I., Introduction.) The dialectical process completes itself not only by gradual transitions, but also by leaps. Hegel remarks: