In this way the process of knowing seems always to stop short at the critical moment, when the truth is just about to be reached.  And those who dwell on this aspect alone are apt to conclude that man’s intellect is touched with a kind of impotence, which makes it useless when it gets near the reality.  It is like a weapon that snaps at the hilt just when the battle is hottest.  For we seem to be able to know everything but the reality, and yet apart from the real essence all knowledge seems to be merely apparent.  Physical science penetrates through the outer appearances of things to their laws, analyzes them into forms of energy, calculates their action and predicts their effects with certainty.  Its practical power over the forces of nature is so great that it seems to have got inside her secrets.  And yet science will itself acknowledge that in every simplest object there is an unknown.  Its triumphant course of explaining seems to be always arrested at the threshold of reality.  It has no theory, scarcely an hypothesis, of the actual nature of things, or of what that is in each object, which constitutes it a real existence.  Natural science, with a scarcely concealed sneer, hands over to the metaphysician all questions as to the real being of things; and itself makes the more modest pretension of showing how things behave, not what they are; what effects follow the original noumenal causes, but not the veritable nature of these causes.  Nor can the metaphysician, in his turn, do more than suggest a hypothesis as to the nature of the ultimate reality in things.  He cannot detect or demonstrate it in any particular fact.  In a word, every minutest object in the world baffles the combined powers of all forms of human thought, and holds back its essence or true being from them.  And as long as this true being, or reality is not known, the knowledge which we seem to have cannot be held as ultimately true, but is demonstrably a makeshift.

Having made this confession, there seems to be no alternative but to postulate an utter discrepancy between human thought and real existence, or between human knowledge and truth, which is the correspondence of thing and thought.  For, at no point is knowledge found to be in touch with real being; it is everywhere demonstrably conditioned and relative, and inadequate to express the true reality of its objects.  What remains, then, except to regard human knowledge as completely untrustworthy, as merely of phenomena?  If we cannot know any reality, does not knowledge completely fail?

Now, in dealing with the moral life of man, we saw that the method of hard alternatives is invalid.  The moral life, being progressive, was shown to be the meeting—­point of the ideal and the actual; and the ideal of perfect goodness was regarded as manifesting itself in actions which, nevertheless, were never adequate to express it.  The good when achieved was ever condemned as unworthy, and the ideal when attained ever pressed for more adequate expression in a better character.  The ideal was present as potency, as realizing itself, but it was never completely realized.  The absolute good was never reached in the best action, and never completely missed in the worst.