When these different aspects of truth are grasped together from the point of view of evolution, there seems to be a way of escaping the difficulties to which they give rise.  For the ideal must be present at the beginning, and cannot be present in its fulness till the process is complete.  What is here required is to lift our theory of man’s knowledge to the level of our theory of his moral life, and to treat it frankly as the process whereby reality manifests itself in the mind of man.  In that way, we shall avoid the absurdities of both of the abstract schools of philosophy, to both of which alike the native intelligence of man gives the lie.  We shall say neither that man knows nothing, nor that he knows all; we shall regard his knowledge, neither as purely phenomenal and out of all contact with reality, nor as an actual identification with the real being of things in all their complex variety.  For, in morality, we do not say either that the individual is absolutely evil, because his actions never realize the supreme ideal of goodness; nor, that he is at the last term of development, and “taking the place of God,” because he lives as “ever in his great Taskmaster’s eye.”  Just as every moral action, however good, leaves something still to be desiderated, something that may become a stepping-stone for new movement towards the ideal which it has failed to actualize; so all our knowledge of an object leaves something over that we have not apprehended, which is truer and more real than anything we know, and which in all future effort we strive to master.  And, just as the very effort, to be good derives its impulse and direction from the ideal of goodness which is present, and striving for realization; so the effort to know derives its impulse and direction from the reality which is present, and striving for complete realization in the thought of man.  We know reality confusedly from the first; and it is because we have attained so much knowledge, that we strive for greater clearness and fulness.  It is by planting his foot on the world that man travels.  It is by opposing his power to the given reality that his knowledge grows.

When once we recognize that reality is the ideal of knowledge, we are able to acknowledge all the truth that is in the doctrine of the phenomenalists, without falling into their errors and contradictions.  We may go as far as the poet in confessing intellectual impotence, and roundly call the knowledge of man “lacquered ignorance.”  “Earth’s least atom” does veritably remain an enigma.  Man is actually flung back into his circumscribed sphere by every fact; and he will continue to be so flung to the end of time.  He will never know reality, nor be able to hold up in his hand the very heart of the simplest thing in the world.  For the world is an organic totality, and its simplest thing will not be seen, through and through, till everything is known, till every fact and event is related to every other under principles which are universal: