“Hegel achieved the most miraculous things,” wrote Karl Popper. “A master logician it was child's play for his powerful dialetical method to draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical hats”.

It is a serious charge, supported by Hegel's preference for Kepler over Newton, his ‘deduction of the actual position of the planets’ while ignoring the recent discovery of the planet Ceres, and his claim that ‘magnetizing iron increases its weight’.

Because Popper is so convinced that Hegel is a fraud, he does not deign to investigate the actual pattern of Hegel's argument. The obscure, abstract vocabulary is dismissed as bombast and tautology.