One might legitimately ask whether such a reading presents nature as the driving force in Hegel's thought – a move that would be acutely at odds with the entire upshot of his speculative philosophy of freedom. After all, it was Hegel who described the stars as a ‘gleaming leprosy in the sky’. The central concern is that we have conflated nature with the power of spirit because the disruptive quality that our investigation has genetically mapped and assigned to nature is, in actuality, the first inarticulate stirrings of spirit only dimly, vaguely aware, and in possession, of itself. In this way, our reading is misplaced: it confounds nature with spirit and proceeds by way of conflation.

Responding, we reassert and amplify what we have maintained and systematically developed since the outset of our current investigation: Hegel's speculative system conceives of nature as 1) radical exteriority and 2) minimally conceptual, therefore indeterminate. However, both of these features are insufficient to categorically capturing the essence of spirit, and, therefore, there must be some fundamental sense in which the two registers are qualitatively distinct, if still dynamically interconnected, in important, even inseparable, ways. It is not enough to say that what we witness throughout the entirety of Hegel's philosophy of nature is nothing other than thought, the power of spirit in its most inchoate forms, all the way down the line. Such a move tends to reduce the real qualitative difference that, in Hegel's view, holds between the two spheres, and it generalises across contexts in a manner that is entirely un-Hegelian. One might legitimately ask why there would even be a philosophy of nature if it was tracking nothing other than the movement of spirit and thought. It also tends to ignore the constitutive distinction of the philosophy of the real (that between nature and culture).