In this way the process of knowing seems always to stop short at the
critical moment, when the truth is just about to be reached. And those
who dwell on this aspect alone are apt to conclude that man's intellect
is touched with a kind of impotence, which makes it useless when it gets
near the reality. It is like a weapon that snaps at the hilt just when
the battle is hottest. For we seem to be able to know everything but the
reality, and yet apart from the real essence all knowledge seems to be
merely apparent. Physical science penetrates through the outer
appearances of things to their laws, analyzes them into forms of energy,
calculates their action and predicts their effects with certainty. Its
practical power over the forces of nature is so great that it seems to
have got inside her secrets. And yet science will itself acknowledge
that in every simplest object there is an unknown. Its triumphant course
of explaining seems to be always arrested at the threshold of reality.
It has no theory, scarcely an hypothesis, of the actual nature of
things, or of what that is in each object, which constitutes it a real
existence. Natural science, with a scarcely concealed sneer, hands over
to the metaphysician all questions as to the real being of things; and
itself makes the more modest pretension of showing how things behave,
not what they are; what effects follow the original noumenal causes, but
not the veritable nature of these causes. Nor can the metaphysician, in
his turn, do more than suggest a hypothesis as to the nature of the
ultimate reality in things. He cannot detect or demonstrate it in any
particular fact. In a word, every minutest object in the world baffles
the combined powers of all forms of human thought, and holds back its
essence or true being from them. And as long as this true being, or
reality is not known, the knowledge which we seem to have cannot be held
as ultimately true, but is demonstrably a makeshift.

Having made this confession, there seems to be no alternative but to
postulate an utter discrepancy between human thought and real existence,
or between human knowledge and truth, which is the correspondence of
thing and thought. For, at no point is knowledge found to be in touch
with real being; it is everywhere demonstrably conditioned and relative,
and inadequate to express the true reality of its objects. What remains,
then, except to regard human knowledge as completely untrustworthy, as
mere