Hegel's method

Here is Hegel's words from his Philosophy of Mind where he expresses how he brings substance from mental attention. (For him, I intepret "negative" as passage-movement to another phase, "positive" is expressive, while "mode" can be either)

"We have one factor in Attention- the abstract identical direction of mind (in feeling, as also all other more advanced developments of it)- an active self collection- the factor of fixing it as our own... [I]nvest the special quality of feeling, as contrasted with this inwardness of mind, with the character of something existence, but as a negative and as the abstract otherness of itself. Intelligence will thus define the content of sensation as something that is out of itself, and projects it into time and space, which are the forms in which it is intuitive. To the view of consciousness the material is only an object of consciousness, a relative other: from mind it receives the rational characteristic of being its very other. When intelligence reaches a concrete unity of the two factors, that is to say, when it is at once self-collected in this externally existing material, and yet in this self-collectedness sunk into the out-of-self, it is Intuition or Mental Vision. At and towards this is its own out-of-selfness, and intelligence no less essentially directs its attention. In this its immediacy it is an awaking to itself, a recollection of itself."

A little Kant, a little Plato, and a lot of revelation about how Hegel philosophized.

(Philosophy is a lot more about mulling than say mathematical thinking).