knowledge. We can only know its manifestations; but
these manifestations are not its reality, nor connected with it. These
belong to the sphere of knowledge, they are parts in a system of
abstract thoughts; they do not exist in that system, or no-system, of
individual realities, each of which, in its veritable being, is itself
only, and connected with nought beside.

Now, this view of the absolute impossibility of knowing any reality, on
account of the fundamental difference between things and our thoughts
about things, contains a better promise of a true view both of reality
and of knowledge, than any of the previously mentioned half-hearted
theories. It forces us explicitly either to regard every effort to know
as futile, or else to regard it as futile _on this theory of it_. In
other words, we must either give up knowledge or else give up the
account of knowledge advanced by these philosophers. Hitherto, however,
every philosophy that has set itself against the possibility of the
knowledge of reality has had to give way. It has failed to shake the
faith of mankind in its own intellectual endowment, or to arrest, even
for a moment, the attempt by thinking to know things as they are. The
view held by Berkeley, that knowledge is merely subjective, because the
essence of things consists in their being perceived by the individual,
and that they are nothing but his ideas, was refuted by Kant, when he
showed that the very illusion of seeming knowledge was impossible on
that theory. And this later view, which represents knowledge as merely
subjective, on the ground that it is the product of the activity of the
thought of mankind, working according to universal laws, is capable of
being refuted in the same manner. The only difference between the
Berkeleian and this modern speculative theory is that, on the former
view, each individual constructed his own subjective entities or
illusions; while, on the latter, all men, by reason of the universality
of the laws of thought governing their minds, create the same illusion,
the same subjective scheme of ideas. Instead of each having his own
private unreality, as the product of his perceiving activity, they have
all the same, or at least a similar, phantom-world of ideas, as the
result of their thinking. But, in both cases alike, the reality of the
world without is out of reach, and knowledge is a purely subjective
apprehension of a world within. Thoughts are quite different from
t