stirring in the thickets of long ago

Speculative thinking compares the apparent or given form of things to the potentialities of those same things, and in so doing distinguishes the essence from their accidental state of existence. This result is achieved not through some process of mystical intuition, but by a method of conceptual cognition, which examines the process whereby each from has become what it is. Speculative thinking conceives the intellectual and material world not as a totality of fixed and stable relations, but as a becoming, and its being as a produced and a producing.

Hegel.