"Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the notion of knowledge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion, counts for it rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair. For what happens on it is not what is ordinarily understood when the word ‘doubt’ is used: shilly-shallying about this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has be appropriately dispelled – so that at the end of the process the matter is taken to be what it was in the first place. On the contrary, this process is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized notion."