 The claim for the identity of thought and being was the cornerstone of the Hegelian philosophy in which Feuerbach finds the “old” philosophy perfected, and one of the principal “theses” of the new philosophy is its rejection of this claim. Feuerbach argues that, because the concept of pure being with which Hegel begins the Logic is an abstraction, in the end Hegel succeeds only in reconciling thought with the thought of being, and not with being itself. The new philosophy affirms that being is distinct from, and prior to, thought, and that it is as various as is the panoply of individually existing beings, from which it cannot be intelligibly distinguished. 