Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 30

The position at which we now take up this movement is spared the cancellation of existence; what yet remains and requires further reconstruction is the imagination [Vorstellung] and familiarity with the forms. By that previous negation, existence, taken back into substance, only then is immediately transferred into the element of self; the property acquired by self thus still has the same character of uncomprehended immediacy, of unmoved indifference, which existence itself had; existence has in this way merely passed into imagination. At the same time, it has thereby become something familiar, something with which existing spirit is finished, in which, therefore, its activity and thus its interest no longer lies. While the activity which is finished with existence is itself merely the movement of the particular, self-uncomprehending spirit, knowledge, on the other hand is directed against the imagination which has thus arisen, against this condition of familiarity; it is the activity of the general self, the interest of thought.