Those who understand Kant better carry his scepticism further, and they complete the divorce between man’s knowledge and reality.  The process of knowing, they hold, instead of leading us towards facts, as it was so long supposed to do, takes us away from them:  i.e., if either “towards” or “away from” can have any meaning when applied to two realms which are absolutely severed from one another.  Knowledge is always concerned with the relations between things; with their likeness, or unlikeness, their laws, or connections; but these are universals, and things are individuals.  Science knows the laws of things, but not the things; it reveals how one object affects another, how it is connected with it; but what are the things themselves, which are connected, it does not know.  The laws are mere forms of thought, “bloodless categories,” and not facts.  They may somehow be regarded as explaining facts, but they must not be identified with the facts.  Knowledge is the sphere of man’s thoughts, and is made up of ideas; real things are in another sphere, which man’s thoughts cannot reach.  We must distinguish more clearly than has hitherto been done, between logic as the science of knowledge, and metaphysics as a science which pretends to reveal the real nature of things.  In a word, we can know thoughts or universals, but not things or particular existences.  “When existence is in question it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual is not a composite of species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre of its being.”  Each object keeps its own real being to itself.  Its inmost secret, its reality, is something that cannot appear in knowledge.  We can only know its manifestations; but these manifestations are not its reality, nor connected with it.  These belong to the sphere of knowledge, they are parts in a system of abstract thoughts; they do not exist in that system, or no-system, of individual realities, each of which, in its veritable being, is itself only, and connected with nought beside.

Now, this view of the absolute impossibility of knowing any reality, on account of the fundamental difference between things and our thoughts about things, contains a better promise of a true view both of reality and of knowledge, than any of the previously mentioned half-hearted theories.  It forces us explicitly either to regard every effort to know as futile, or else to regard it as futile on this theory of it.  In other words, we must either give up knowledge or else give up the account of knowledge advanced by these philosophers.  Hitherto, however, every philosophy that has set itself against the possibility of the knowledge of reality has had to give way.  It has failed to shake the faith of mankind in its own intellectual endowment, or to arrest, even for a moment, the attempt by thinking to know things as they are.  The view held by Berkeley, that knowledge is merely subjective, because the essence of things