It is famously difficult to understand the argument of Hegel's Science of Logic. This difficulty is attested to by Hegel himself in the opening passages of the Logic, in which he draws an analogy between studying logic (the determinations of thought) in isolation from the sciences of nature and spirit, and studying grammar in isolation from knowledge of actual languages. Hegel suggests that just as the “substantial, living value” of grammar becomes evident when it is studied by those already linguistically competent across different natural languages, so the “substantial, living value” of logic will be evident to those already knowledgeable about (experienced in) the realms of nature and spirit (L: 57). This does not mean that logic cannot be grasped in and of itself, but Hegel suggests that any such grasp will be necessarily impoverished:

Having said this, however, in seeming contradiction Hegel goes on to defend the study of logic as such as the ideal route for the education of consciousness into the power of thought itself, “remote from sensuous intuitions and aims, from feelings, from the imagined world of figurate conception” (L: 59).