what is conceived as the real world of facts.  This truth, namely, that the ideal knowledge is knowledge of reality, the most subjective philosopher cannot but acknowledge.  It is implied in his condemnation of knowledge as merely phenomenal, that there is possible a knowledge of real being.  That thought and reality can be brought together, or rather, that they are always together, is presupposed in all knowledge and in all experience.  The effort to know is the effort to explain the relation of thought and reality, not to create it.  The ideal of perfect knowledge is present from the first; it generates the effort, directs it, distinguishes between truth and error.  And that which man ever aims at, whether in the ordinary activities of daily thought, or through the patient labour of scientific investigation, or in the reflective self-torture of philosophic thought, is to know the world as it is.  No failure damps the ardour of this endeavour.  Relativists, phenomenalists, agnostics, sceptics, Kantians or Neo-Kantians—­all the crowd of thinkers who cry down the human intellect, and draw a charmed circle around reality so as to make it unapproachable to the mind of man—­ply this useless labour.  They are seeking to penetrate beneath the shows of sense and the outer husk of phenomena to the truth, which is the meeting-point of knowledge and reality; they are endeavouring to translate into an intellectual possession the powers that play within and around them; or, in other words, to make these powers express themselves in their thoughts, and supply the content of their spiritual life.  The irony, latent in their endeavour, gives them no pause; they are in some way content to pursue what they call phantoms, and to try to satisfy their thirst with the waters of a mirage.  This comes from the presence of the ideal within them, that is, of the implicit unity of reality and thought, which seeks for explicit and complete manifestation in knowledge.  The reality is present in them as thinking activity, working towards complete revelation of itself by means of knowledge.  And its presence is real, although the process is never complete.

In knowledge, as in morals, it is necessary to remember both of the truths implied in the pursuit of an ideal—­that a growing thing not only always fails to attain, but also always succeeds.  The distinction between truth and error in knowledge is present at every stage in the effort to attain truth, as the distinction between right and wrong is present in every phase of the moral life.  It is the source of the intellectual effort.  But that distinction cannot be drawn except by reference to a criterion of truth, which condemns our actual knowledge; as it is the absolute good, which condemns the present character.  The ideal may be indefinite, and its content confused and poor; but it is always sufficient for its purpose, always better than the actual achievement.  And, in this sense, reality, the truth, the veritable being of things, is always reached by the poorest knowledge.  As there is no starved and distorted sapling which is not the embodiment of the principle of natural life, so the meanest character is the product of an ideal of goodness, and the most confused opinion of ignorant mankind is an expression of the reality of things.  Without it there would not be even the semblance of knowledge, not even error and untruth.