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:
just as goodness cannot be fully achieved in any act, till the agent is
in all ways lifted to the level of absolute goodness. Physics cannot
reveal the forces which keep a stone in its place on the earth, till it
has traced the forces that maintain the starry systems in their course.
No fact can be thoroughly known, _i.e._, known in its reality, till the
light of the universe has been focussed upon it: and, on the other hand,
to know any subject through and through would be to explain all being.
The highest law and the essence of the simple fact, the universal and
the particular, can only be known together, in and through one another.