Sections 78-79 form a bridge between what is merely apparent knowing in the form of skepticism, the movement of natural consciousness driven toward knowledge, and the transition to determinate negation. In §78, Hegel calls the path of natural consciousness the “path of doubt, or, more properly, [the] path of despair,” pointing to the fate of the consciousness to be disappointed each time as truth reveals itself to be untruth. Consciousness passes through various shapes as it traverses knowing, and the full series of shapes Hegel calls the “full history of the cultivation of consciousness itself into science.”
The disappointment of consciousness in knowing is only productive if it determinately negates the untruth its knowing has become. The skeptic can on the one hand reject all knowledge save for its knowledge of its own existence, and it can stay in this skepticism forever. The skeptic determines various shapes of knowledge to be empty and merely nothing, for the truth that they seemed to be reveals itself to be empty. If one is able to give a shape to that nothing by understanding that the nothing which results from the operation of testing knowledge, they can grasp that nothing as a productive result: a determinate negation. In this negation, “the transition is made whereby the profession through the complete series of shapes comes about on its own accord.”