universal? How is it known
that the true being of things is different from ideas? Surely both of
the terms must be regarded as known to some extent, if they are called
like or unlike, contrasted or compared, opposed or identified.

But, lastly, this theory has to account for the fact that it constitutes
what is not only unreal, but impossible, into the criterion of what is
actual. If knowledge of reality is altogether different from human
knowledge, how does it come to be its criterion? That knowledge is
inadequate or imperfect can be known, only by contrasting it with its
own proper ideal, whatever that may be. A criticism by reference to a
foreign or irrelevant criterion, or the condemnation of a theory as
imperfect because it does not realize an impossible end, is
unreasonable. All true criticism of an object implies a reference to a
more perfect state of itself.

We must, then, regard the knowledge of objects as they are, which is
opposed to human knowledge, as, only a completer and fuller form of that
knowledge; or else we must cease to contrast it with our human
knowledge, as valid with invalid, true with phenomenal. Either knowledge
of reality is complete knowledge, or else it is a chimera. And, in
either case, the sharp distinction between the real and the phenomenal
vanishes; and what remains, is not a reality outside of consciousness,
or different from ideas, but a reality related to consciousness, or, in
other words, a knowable reality. "The distinction of objects into
phenomena and noumena, _i.e._, into things that for us exist, and things
that for us do not exist, is an Irish bull in philosophy," said Heine.
To speak of reality as unknowable, or to speak of anything as
unknowable, is to utter a direct self-contradiction; it is to negate in
the predicate what is asserted in the subject. It is a still more
strange perversion to erect this knowable emptiness into a criterion of
knowledge, and to call the latter phenomenal by reference to it.

These difficulties are so fundamental and so obvious, that the theory of
the phenomenal nature of human knowledge, which, being interpreted,
means that we know nothing, could scarcely maintain its hold, were it
not confused with another fact of human experience, that is apparently
inconsistent with the doctrine that man can know the truth. Side by side
with the faith of ordinary consciousness, that in order to know anything
we must think, or, in other words, that knowle