dge shows us what things
really are, there is a conviction, strengthened by constant experience,
that we never know things fully. Every investigation into the nature of
an object soon brings us to an enigma, a something more we do not know.
Failing to know this something more, we generally consider that we have
fallen short of reaching the reality of the object. We recognize, as it
has been expressed, that we have been brought to a stand, and we
therefore conclude that we are also brought to the end. We arrive at
what we do not know, and we pronounce that unknown to be unknowable;
that is, we regard it as something different in nature from what we do
know. So far as I can see, the attitude of ordinary thought in regard to
this matter might be fairly represented by saying, that it always begins
by considering objects as capable of being known in their reality, or as
they are, and that experience always proves the attempt to know them as
they are to be a failure. The effort is continued although failure is
the result, and even although that failure be exaggerated and
universalized into that despair of knowledge which we have described. We
are thus confronted with what seems to be a contradiction; a trust and
distrust in knowledge. It can only be solved by doing full justice to
both of the conflicting elements; and then, if possible, by showing that
they are elements, and not the complete, concrete fact, except when held
together.

From one point of view, it is undeniable that in every object of
perception, we come upon problems that we cannot solve. Science at its
best, and even when dealing with the simplest of things, is forced to
stop short of its final secret. Even when it has discovered its law,
there is still apparently something over and above which science cannot
grasp, and which seems to give to the object its reality. All the
natural sciences concentrated on a bit of iron ore fail to exhaust the
truth in it: there is always a "beyond" in it, something still more
fundamental which is not yet understood. And that something beyond, that
inner essence, that point in which the laws meet and which the sciences
fail to lift into knowledge, is regarded as just the reality of the
thing. Thus the reality is supposed, at the close of every
investigation, to lie outside of knowledge; and conversely, all that we
do know, seeing that it lacks this last element, seems to be only
apparent knowledge, or knowledge of phenomena.