Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, paragraph 27

This becoming of science in general, or of knowledge, is what this phenomenology of spirit depicts. Knowledge, as it is at the start, or the immediate spirit, is the spirit-less, sensorial consciousness. To become actual knowledge, or to generate the element of science – that it itself is its pure concept – comes about by following a long laborious road. This becoming, as it is presented in its content and in the shapes which manifest themselves in it, will not be what is imagined at first to be an introduction of the unscientific consciousness to science, and it is also something other than the foundations of science; at any rate it is something else than the sort of ecstatic enthusiasm which starts straight off with absolute knowledge, as if shot out of a pistol, and makes short work of other points of view simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them.