Conceptual thinking as ordinarily employed and understood involved abstracting from what was empirically given in reality; moreover, all such abstract thought unavoidably required or presupposed at some point a thinker in the shape of an existing individual. To assert, as Hegel in effect did, that thought was logically prior to existence was to reverse the true order and amounted to reviving, albeit in a confusing and sophistical form, a mode of argument whose fallaciousness had been sufficiently exposed by Kant.
