The fact that the main essential features of the human sciences could thus be more or less successfully constructed was still no proof of the correctness of the philosophy of identity upon which Hegel based his thought. Just the opposite: the decisive test would be the facts of the natural world. It was self-evident that the traces of the human spirit and its stages of development would be rediscovered in humanistic studies. If, however, nature reflects the result of the thought process of a similar creative spirit, then forms and events which are relatively more simple should be all the easier to integrate into the system. But it was at this very juncture that the efforts of the philosophy of identity failed completely. Hegel's philosophy of nature was meaningless to scholars doing research in the natural sciences. Not one of the many outstanding researchers of the era had a practical use for Hegel's ideas. But because Hegel considered it of great importance to achieve in this very field the sort of recognition he was awarded elsewhere, he began an unusually passionate and bitter polemic directed mostly against Newton, the foremost and greatest representative of scientific research. Philosophers accused natural science researchers of narrow-mindedness; scientists reproached philosophers for lacking clear meaning. Scientists began to attach a certain importance to the claim that their work was free of any philosophical influence, and it soon came to be that many of them – including men of great prominence – considered all philosophy to be useless, even destructive dreaming. We cannot deny that, in addition to the philosophy of identity's many unjustified pretenses to dominate other disciplines, many of its legitimate efforts were also cast overboard: namely, philosophy's critique of the sources of knowledge and its attempt to find a common measure for intellectual work.
Things took a different course in the humanities, even if they eventually led to similar results. In all branches of scholarship – in religion, government, law, art, and language – enthusiastic supporters of Hegel arose who sought to reform their fields along the lines of his system and hoped that, through speculation, they could achieve the sort of results which previously were accomplished only through assiduous work. Thus, for a long period, a sharp division developed between the natural sciences and the humanities, and the scientific character of the latter was often disputed.
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