It was both the strength and pride of Hegel's philosophy that had effectively enabled speculative philosophy to grasp the entire world of actuality in terms of the specific theoretical form of that philosophy. Hegel was a historical thinker, and one who was oriented essentially toward the history of constitutions and of organized forms of social life in general. The speculative form of philosophical theory, whatever the theoretical reasons that made it seem indispensable to him, validly and effectively counted for Hegel only to the extent that it succeeded not merely in describing such forms of life in all their internal complexity, but also in grasping them and rendering them intelligible in a conceptual form that was peculiar to and derivable only from the standpoint of speculative philosophy. For only speculative thought is truly concrete. And such thought is concrete only insofar as it articulates itself precisely in the proper form of its own concepts.

We actually know very little about the specific convictions and particular intellectual steps that first led Hegel to this idea of an authentic conceptual form through which, at every stage in the development of his system, he would attempt to comprehend the various individual domains of actuality both in their concrete character and in the form of their systematic structure. Hegel must have taken most important steps in this direction during his last years at Frankfurt. For even then Hegel was already developing the foundations for his dissertation On the Orbits of the Planets.