 Contemporary philosophical discussion about the nature of the elements begins with the work of Friedrich Paneth (1887–1958), whose work heavily influenced IUPAC standards and definitions. He was among the first chemists in modern times to make explicit the distinction between the last point of analysis and actual components analyses, and argued that the last point in analysis thesis could not be the proper basis for the chemical explanation of the nature of compounds. Something that wasn’t actually present in a substance couldn’t be invoked to explain the properties in a real substance. He went on to say that the chemically important notion of element was “transcendental,” which we interpret to mean “an abstraction over the properties in compounds” (Paneth 1962).