In the previous chapter I tried to explain how the movement of Thought has features which are, from the point of view of ‘ordinary common sense’, flatly self-contradictory. They are self-contradictory for a metaphysical philosophy which conceives transcendental or absolute reality by extending ways of thinking derived from empirical reality, as Neo-Platonism does with its light-imagery. In this chapter I intend to characterize the nature of Thought. I have argued that it is a specific feature of the dialectical movement that we cannot answer such questions as ‘what does the dialectical movement consist in?’ by giving an argumentative equivalent in ordinary discourse; the experience of Thought is an ineliminable feature of the dialectical progress, and, moreover, cannot be given an equivalent in the ordinary propositional form. It is only open to the critic and commentator to characterize the experience, not to give an equivalent which might substitute for or translate it.

But this clearly raises a problem; when we characterize an experience we try to answer the question ‘what is it like?’. But the experience of Thought is an experience which is sui generis; the point is that it is not like finite experience at all, and it was the extension of such finite ways of thinking to the transcendental realm that led to the self-contradictions of traditional metaphysical philosophy. Hegel's Science, animated by the ‘movement of the notion’ is the radically non-metaphorical discourse. Its deep truth is imageless.