then are the real things to which they are opposed?  What right has any philosophy to say that there is any reality which no one can in any sense know?  The knowledge that such reality is, is surely a relation between that reality and consciousness, and, if so, the assertion of an unknowable reality is self-contradictory.  For the conception of it is the conception of something that is, and at the same time is not, out of relation to consciousness.

To say what kind of thing reality is, is a still more remarkable feat, if reality is unknowable.  Reality, being beyond knowledge, why is it called particular or individual, rather than universal?  How is it known that the true being of things is different from ideas?  Surely both of the terms must be regarded as known to some extent, if they are called like or unlike, contrasted or compared, opposed or identified.

But, lastly, this theory has to account for the fact that it constitutes what is not only unreal, but impossible, into the criterion of what is actual.  If knowledge of reality is altogether different from human knowledge, how does it come to be its criterion?  That knowledge is inadequate or imperfect can be known, only by contrasting it with its own proper ideal, whatever that may be.  A criticism by reference to a foreign or irrelevant criterion, or the condemnation of a theory as imperfect because it does not realize an impossible end, is unreasonable.  All true criticism of an object implies a reference to a more perfect state of itself.

We must, then, regard the knowledge of objects as they are, which is opposed to human knowledge, as, only a completer and fuller form of that knowledge; or else we must cease to contrast it with our human knowledge, as valid with invalid, true with phenomenal.  Either knowledge of reality is complete knowledge, or else it is a chimera.  And, in either case, the sharp distinction between the real and the phenomenal vanishes; and what remains, is not a reality outside of consciousness, or different from ideas, but a reality related to consciousness, or, in other words, a knowable reality.  “The distinction of objects into phenomena and noumena, i.e., into things that for us exist, and things that for us do not exist, is an Irish bull in philosophy,” said Heine.  To speak of reality as unknowable, or to speak of anything as unknowable, is to utter a direct self-contradiction; it is to negate in the predicate what is asserted in the subject.  It is a still more strange perversion to erect this knowable emptiness into a criterion of knowledge, and to call the latter phenomenal by reference to it.