reality is refuted by its own starting-point; for it begins with a given
something, regarded as real, and its very effort to know is an attempt
to know that reality by thinking. But it forgets these facts, when it is
discovered that knowledge at the best is incomplete. It is thus tossed
from assertion to denial, and from denial to assertion; from one
abstract or one-sided view of reality, to the other.

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