The beginning of philosophy must hold a germ of development, however dead and motionless it may seem. But it must also to some extent be a result,--the result of the development or concentration of consciousness;--of the other forms of which it is the hypothetical foundation, or, of which it is (otherwise viewed) the first appearance. The variety of imaginative conception, and the chaos of sense, must vanish in a point, by an act of abstraction, which leaves out all the variety and the chaos,--or rather by an act of distillation, which draws out of them their real essence and concentrated virtue. This variety, when thoroughly examined and tested, shrivels up into a point:--it only _is._ Everything definite as we call it, the endless repetitions of existence, have disappeared, and have left only the energy of concentration, the unitary point of Being. We may describe the process in two ways. We may say that we have left out of sight all existing differences,--that we have stripped off every vestige of empirical conceptions, and left a residue of pure thought. The thought is pure, perhaps, but it is not entire. In this way of describing it, pure thought is the most abstract thought,--the last outcome of those operations which have divested our conceptions of everything real and concrete about them. But thus to speak of the process as Abstraction would be to express half of the truth only: and would really leave us a mere zero, or gulf of vacuity. In the beginning there would then be nothing--the mere annihilation of all possible and actual existence. And it is certainly true that in the beginning there can be nothing.--On the other hand, and secondly, there is affirmation as well as negation involved in the ultimate action by which sense and imagination pass into thought. They are not left behind, and the emptiness only retained: they are carried into their primary consequence, or into their proximate truth. They are reduced to their simplest equivalent or their lowest term in the vocabulary of thought: which is Being. The process which creates the initial point of pure thought is at once an abstraction from everything, and a concentration upon itself in a point:-- which point, accordingly, is a unity or inter-penetration of positive and negative. This absolute self-concentration into a point is the primary step by which Mind comes to know itself,--the first step in the Absolute's process of self-cognition--that process which it is the purpose of Logic to trace, so far as it is conducted in the range of mere thought.