at ideal is never completely missed even in the
poorest knowledge. If it grows, the method of fixed alternatives must be
inapplicable to it. The ideal, whatever it may be, must be considered as
active in the present, guiding the whole movement, and gradually
manifesting itself in each of the passing forms, which are used up as
the raw material of new acquirement; and yet no passing form completely
expresses the ideal.

Nor is it difficult to say what that ideal of knowledge is, although we
cannot define it in any adequate manner. We know that the end of
morality is the _summum bonum_, although we cannot, as long as we are
progressive, define its whole content, or find it fully realized in any
action. Every failure brings new truth, every higher grade of moral
character reveals some new height of goodness to be scaled; the moral
ideal acquires definiteness and content as humanity moves upwards. And
yet the ideal is not entirely unknown even at the first; even to the
most ignorant, it presents itself as a criterion which enables him to
distinguish between right and wrong, evil and goodness, and which guides
his practical life. The same truth holds with regard to knowledge. Its
growth receives its impulse from, and is directed and determined by,
what is conceived as the real world of facts. This truth, namely, that
the ideal knowledge is knowledge of reality, the most subjective
philosopher cannot but acknowledge. It is implied in his condemnation of
knowledge as merely phenomenal, that there is possible a knowledge of
real being. That thought and reality can be brought together, or rather,
that they are always together, is presupposed in all knowledge and in
all experience. The effort to know is the effort to _explain_ the
relation of thought and reality, not to create it. The ideal of perfect
knowledge is present from the first; it generates the effort, directs
it, distinguishes between truth and error. And that which man ever aims
at, whether in the ordinary activities of daily thought, or through the
patient labour of scientific investigation, or in the reflective
self-torture of philosophic thought, is to know the world as it is. No
failure damps the ardour of this endeavour. Relativists, phenomenalists,
agnostics, sceptics, Kantians or Neo-Kantians--all the crowd of thinkers
who cry down the human intellect, and draw a charmed circle around
reality so as to make it unapproachable to the mind of man--ply this
useless