ly of phenomena? If we cannot know _any_ reality, does not knowledge
completely fail?

Now, in dealing with the moral life of man, we saw that the method of
hard alternatives is invalid. The moral life, being progressive, was
shown to be the meeting--point of the ideal and the actual; and the
ideal of perfect goodness was regarded as manifesting itself in actions
which, nevertheless, were never adequate to express it. The good when
achieved was ever condemned as unworthy, and the ideal when attained
ever pressed for more adequate expression in a better character. The
ideal was present as potency, as realizing itself, but it was never
completely realized. The absolute good was never reached in the best
action, and never completely missed in the worst.

The same conflict of real and unreal was shown to be essential to every
natural life. As long as anything grows it neither completely attains,
nor completely falls away from its ideal. The growing acorn is not an
oak tree, and yet it is not a mere acorn. The child is not the man; and
yet the man is in the child, and only needs to be evolved by interaction
with circumstances. The process of growth is one wherein the ideal is
always present, as a reconstructive power gradually changing its whole
vehicle, or organism, into a more perfect expression of itself. The
ideal is reached in the end, just because it is present in the
beginning; and there is no end as long as growth continues.

Now, it is evident that knowledge, whether it be that of the individual
man or of the human race, is a thing that grows. The process by means of
which natural science makes progress, or by which the consciousness of
the child expands and deepens into the consciousness of the man, is best
made intelligible from the point of view of evolution. It is like an
organic process, in which each new acquirement finds its place in an old
order, each new fact is brought under the permanent principles of
experience, and absorbed into an intellectual life, which itself, in
turn, grows richer and fuller with every new acquisition. No knowledge
worthy of the name is an aggregation of facts. Wisdom comes by growth.

Hence, the assertion that knowledge never attains reality, does not
imply that it always misses it. In morals we do not say that a man is
entirely evil, although he never, even in his best actions, attains the
true good. And if the process of knowing is one that presses onward
towards an ideal, th