Nevertheless, the history of thought does not stop at Hegel. In Hegel himself are found the points to which later history must attach itself; the lacunæ which he left and the errors into which he fell. The fundamental error was the abuse of the dialectic method, which originated for the philosophic solution of the problem of opposites, but was extended by Hegel to the distinct concepts, so that he interpreted even the Kantian synthesis itself as nothing but the unity of opposites. Hence arises his incapacity to attribute their true value and function to the alogical forms of the spirit, such as art, and to the atheoretic, such as the natural sciences and mathematics; and even to logical thought itself, which, violating the laws of the synthesis, ended by imposing itself upon history and the natural sciences, attempting to resolve them into itself by dialectizing them, as the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature. To this, therefore, is due the philosophism or panlogism which is characteristic of the system. This error was assisted by Hegel's want of clearness as to the nature of the empirical sciences. For him as for Kant, these remained _sciences,_ that is to say, knowledge of truth, although imperfect knowledge of it. They therefore constituted even for him the material or the first step in philosophy. It is true that he also had other more acute and profound thoughts upon this subject. Amid a number of incidental observations, he emphasized the arbitrariness (_Willkurlichkeit_), with which those forms are affected; and this is tantamount to declaring their practical and atheoretic character. But instead of respecting this character, he decided upon surpassing it by means of a philosophic transformation of those sciences, which was not so much their death as pretended philosophies (a most true conclusion), as their elevation to the rank of particular philosophies by means of a mixture of empirical concepts and pure concepts, of abstract intellect and of reason. The erroneous tendency found nourishment and took concrete form in the idea of a Philosophy of nature, which Schelling had obtained, partly from Kant himself and partly had found in his own at first latent and then manifest theosophism. In this way, the system of Hegel became divided into three parts, a Logic-metaphysic, a Philosophy of nature and a Philosophy of Spirit, whereas it should on the contrary have unified Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, and expelled the Philosophy of nature. By its internal dialectic, panlogism or philosophism was converted, even in Hegel himself, and still more among his disciples, into mythologism, and from the system of the Idea and of absolute immanence, because of the imperfections which they contained, there reappeared theism and transcendence (the Hegelian right wing).[18] [Sidenote: _Contemporaries of Hegel: Herbart, Schleiermacher, and others._]