When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness
 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic (1816). copy citation

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Author Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Source Science of Logic
Topic beginning thought
Date 1816
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by William Wallace
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55108/55108-h/55108-h.htm

Context

“Or, if we reject reality, as implying a reflection, we get a more immediate or unreflected statement of the same thing, when Jacobi says that the God of Spinoza is the principium of being in all existence. (1) When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another; and in the beginning there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we here have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all.” source