(For, although the term "ontology" has been as good as disused, it still remains true that the aim of philosophy must be to furnish us with an ontology or a coherent and adequate theory of the nature of reality.) But if, on the other hand, knowledge and reality be ab initio opposed to one another - if consciousness be set on one side as over against reality, and merely holding up a mirror to it - then it follows with equal naturalness that the truly real must be something which lurks unrevealed behind the subject's representation of it.
