The philosophy which has just been presented, which could rely on universal assent if it presented itself as a science of thought or of reason and presented God, whom it reached at the end, as the merely logical result of its earlier mediations, acquired, by assuming the appearance of the opposite, a completely false reputation which even contradicted its original thought (hence the changeable and very various judgements that were expressed about it were quite natural). Now one might hope that this philosophy really would withdraw to within this boundary, would declare itself as negative, merely as logical philosophy when Hegel established precisely as the first demand on philosophy that it should withdraw into pure thinking, and that it should have as sole immediate object the pure concept. Hegel cannot be denied the credit for having seen the merely logical nature of the philosophy which he intended to work on and promised to bring to its complete form. If he had stuck to that and if he had carried out this thought by strictly, decisively renouncing everything positive, then he would have brought about the decisive transition to the positive philosophy, for the Negative, the negative pole can never be there in pure form without immediately calling for the positive pole.