hings, and no effort of human reason can reveal any community between
them.

Now, there are certain difficulties which, so far as I know, those who
hold this view have scarcely attempted to meet. The first of these lies
in the obvious fact, that all men at all times consider that this very
process of thinking, which the theory condemns as futile, is the only
way we have of finding out what the reality of things is. Why do we
reflect and think, except in order to pass beyond the illusions of
sensuous appearances to the knowledge of things as they are? Nay, why do
these philosophers themselves reflect, when reflection, instead of
leading to truth, which is knowledge of reality, leads only to ideas,
which, being universal, cannot represent the realities that are said to
be "individual."

The second is, that the knowledge of "the laws" of things gives to us
practical command over them; although, according to this view, laws are
not things, nor any part of the reality of things, nor even true
representations of things. Our authority over things seems to grow _pari
passu_ with our knowledge. The natural sciences seem to prove by their
practical efficiency, that they are not building up a world of
apparitions, like the real world; but gradually getting inside nature,
learning more and more to wield her powers, and to make them the
instruments of the purposes of man, and the means of his welfare. To
common-sense,--which frequently "divines" truths that it cannot prove,
and, like ballast in a ship, has often given steadiness to human
progress although it is only a dead weight,--the assertion that man
knows nothing is as incredible as that he knows all things. If it is
replied, that the "things" which we seem to dominate by the means of
knowledge are themselves only phenomena, the question arises, what then
are the real things to which they are opposed? What right has any
philosophy to say that there is any reality which no one can in any
sense know? The knowledge that such reality is, is surely a relation
between that reality and consciousness, and, if so, the assertion of an
unknowable reality is self-contradictory. For the conception of it is
the conception of something that is, and at the same time is not, out of
relation to consciousness.

To say what kind of thing reality is, is a still more remarkable feat,
if reality is unknowable. Reality, being beyond knowledge, why is it
called particular or individual, rather than