an ideal which is opposed to nothing actual.

In this view, so commonly held in our day, that knowledge is subjective
and reality unknowable, we have another example of the falseness and
inconsistency of abstract thinking. If this error be committed, there is
no fundamental gain in saying with Kant, that things are relative to the
thought of all, instead of asserting, with Berkeley or Browning, that
they are relative to the thought of each. The final result is the same.
Things as known, are reduced into mere creations of thought; things as
they are, are regarded as not thoughts, and as partaking in no way of
the nature of thought. And yet "reality" is virtually assumed to be
given at the beginning of knowledge; for the sensations are supposed to
be emanations from it, or roused in consciousness by it. These
sensations, it is said, man does not make, but receives, and receives
from the concealed reality. They flow from it, and are the
manifestations of its activity. Then, in the next moment, reality is
regarded as not given in any way, but as something to be discovered by
the effort of thought; for we always strive to know things, and not
phantoms. Lastly, the knowledge thus acquired being regarded as
imperfect, and experience showing to us continually that every object
has more in it than we know, the reality is pronounced to be unknowable,
and all knowledge is regarded as failure, as acquaintance with mere
phantoms. Thus, in thought, as in morality, the ideal is present at the
beginning, it is an effort after explicit realization, and its process
is never complete.

Now, all these aspects of the ideal of knowledge, that is, of reality,
are held by the unsophisticated intelligence of man; and abstract
philosophy is not capable of finally getting rid of any one of them. It,
too, holds them _alternately_. Its denial of the possibility of knowing