" The efficient or motive principle, which is not
merely the analysis but the production of the several elements
of the universal, I call dialectic. Dialectic is not that process in
which an object or proposition, presented, to feeling or the
direct consciousness, is analysed, entangled, taken hither and
thither, until at last its contrary is derived. Such a merely
negative method appears frequently in Plato. It may fix the
opposite of any notion, or reveal the contradiction contained
in it, as did the ancient scepticism, or it may in a feeble way
consider an approximation to truth, or modern half-and-half
attainment of it, as its goal. But the higher dialectic of the
conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit
and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive
content and result. Only by such a course is there
development and inherent progress. Hence this dialectic is
not the external agency of subjective thinking, but the private
soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit
organically. Thought regards this development of the idea
and of the peculiar activity of the reason of the idea as only
subjective, but is on its side unable to make any addition. To
consider anything rationally is not to bring reason to it from
the outside, and work it up in this way, but to count it as itself
reasonable. Here it is spirit in its freedom, the summit of selfconscious reason, which gives itself actuality, and produces
itself as the existing world. The business of science is simply
to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing,
to consciousness "

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel