To Plato and Aristotle, there is no doubt that the most knowable things to us are also the most real things in the universe. This would mean the Forms in Platonism, while that would be God to Aristotle. Thus, as our knowledge increases, we get closer to the foundation and the essence of all existence.
In Ancient and Mediaeval philosophy the only contrary word about this would have come[:]
[1] from the Skeptics, or
[2] from theology in which the nature of God transcends our possible knowledge, mainly because God is infinite and our knowledge finite.
[3] There was another twist, however. William of Ockham believed that God in his omnipotence could even violate the principle of non-contradiction.
This scandalized Aristotelians, since allowing the equal reality of contradictions destroys just about the most basic principle of knowledge.
In Modern philosophy there is correspondingly little doubt that knowledge penetrates to the fundaments of reality until we encounter, indeed, [:]
[4] the Skepticism of David Hume, who says, about the objects of scientific inquiry, "These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry" [Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Shelby-Bigge edition, Oxford, 1902, 1972, p.30].
▷ From Hume to Kant:
Now, it was reading Hume, Kant says, that awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Kant's "Copernican Revolution" then not only reverses the roles of representation and object in human knowledge but it radically reverses the overall relation of knowledge and reality -- not a Skeptical denial of knowledge as in Hume, but a kind of restructuring of reality itself.
The simplest 
form of this is familiar enough. Kant believes that:
[1] our knowledge is of phenomena, the objects of appearance,
[2] while reality ultimately is with the things-in-themselves.
If we ask what is the most knowable thing for us, the answer in Kant would be mathematics. There are a couple of things about mathematics that put it in this position. (1) Its abstraction. It is easier to know something of abstract rather than concrete content, though if mathematics cannot be completed (according to Gödel), we are limited by the finitude of our knowledge. (2) Kant believes that mathematics is based on the "pure intuition" of space and time, something that underlies phenomenal objects in space and time but does not extend to things-in-themselves. Thus, although Kant sees mathematics as describing the foundations of the phenomenal world, he does not have a Platonic view of mathematics as taking us to the highest levels of reality.
[1] Kant might outdo Plato in one respect, saying that:
mathematics is the "purest" kind of positive human knowledge, owing nothing at all to experience, despite its application being limited to phenomenal objects.
[2] For Plato, the purest and highest kind of knowledge would be of the Form of the Good.
After mathematics, positive, theoretical knowledge for Kant would mean science. This opens vast expanses, as we have certainly seen since Kant's day.
▷ Kant's things-in-themselves:
When it comes to things-in-themselves, Kant believes that the only kind of positive knowledge we can have is by way of morality. Thus, like Plato, priority is given to the good. Kant, however, does not have the kind of concrete and aesthetic view of the good that Plato has.
[1] We only know the good by way of the Moral Law, the Categorical Imperative. This is itself a very severe abstraction, based on Kant's view of reason as expressed in the forms of logic, whose application is supposed to generate the imperatives of morality. This is all very dubious, though Kant's good sense overlays it with formulations with more substantive content.
[2] Kant then believes that morality provides clues to the Ideas of Reason -- God, freedom, and immorality -- which then give us some notion about realities among thing-in-themselves. 
Aesthetic value itself is reduced to a subjective sense of the "harmony between the faculties," reconciling theoretical knowledge (science) and practical (morality).
In matters of value, Kant's Copernican reversal does not go as far and is not as consistent as with theoretical knowledge. Aesthetic value, which is resistant to analysis, is presumably less knowable than the abstract content of morality, yet Kant removes it from any connection to external reality at all. Kant's Copernican Revolution in this respect is thus not completed until Jakob Fries.
[3] In Fries, we have the distinction betweenWissen, Glaude, and Ahndung, where Wissen ("knowledge") is the positive knowledge of mathematics and science, Glaube ("belief") consists of the abstract clues to things-in-themselves that Kant sees in morality, and then Ahndung ("intimation") consists of the positive aesthetic feelings that relate us directly to things-in-themselves. 
Where Kant only saw religion, "within the limits of reason alone," as consisting of morality, Fries allowed for religion a content of feeling and aesthetic value in addition to that. Needless to say, these aesthetic feelings represent no clear or demonstrable kinds of knowledge.
Although on the right track, the shortcoming of Fries's treatment is that, like Kant's, it is still reductionistic. In the Qur'ân, the Prophet Muhammad denies that he is a poet. Poetry is not prophecy, and religion is not merely art plus morality. Within the framework of Friesian philosophy, this is finally understood by Rudolf Otto. What is characteristic of religion is the sacred or the holy, and the characteristics and feelings associated with this are rather different than the merely aesthetic, or even the aesthetic sense of the sublime. To Otto, one basic feature that will always distinguish the numinous from the merely beautiful or sublime is the uncanny, an eerie sense that seems to accompany something supernatural. The power and splendor of a thunderstorm will seem beautiful, sublime, and terrifying, but it does not convey quite the same kind of fear as a quiet cemetery at night.
Otto thus completes Kant's Copernican Revolution and the reversal of the knowable and the real. Morality now stands in a kind of complete equality with mathematics, yet it does not give rise to the endlessly growing system that mathematics does. Morality has a kind of incompleteness that can only be remedied with a different kind of positive content. Fries returns us to the kind of aesthetic realism found in Plato, while holding that the merely aesthetic is closer to reality than Plato would have allowed (beauty is a clue to the Forms). Finally, Otto identifies something, common to all religion, that is nevertheless difficult to characterize without invoking something contrary to the customary course of nature -- something which thus bespeaks an order beyond the world of experience and science, that which, in the words of the Mandukya Upanishad, is "without an element, what cannot be dealt with or spoken of, the cessation of the phenomenal world, auspicious, nondual."
Here is a graphic I produced for "A New Kant-Friesian System of Metaphysics." This matches up a Friesian metaphysic with the theory of "magnetic substates" in quantum mechanics. 
It presents a model for how the more knowable varies inversely with the more real. Thus, the long arrow, representing the angular momentum vector in quantum mechanics, might here be called the "moment of necessity." In an absolute sense it is equal for all modes of necessity. However, its component in the z axis varies from the full value (positive or negative) to zero. In atoms, the z axis is identifiable in the presence of a magnetic field (hence "magnetic substates"). Here, the z axis represents the phenomenal world in consciousness, which is a fragment of the reality of things-in-themselves. Thus, the full value of the moment of necessity is apparent to us only where it falls entirely in the phenomenal world, which is the case with logic (analytic necessity) and morality. Otherwise, the vector falls outside the phenomenal world, with a larger or smaller component in it. To the extent that the moment of necessity is not reflected in the z axis, it contains content that is concrete and resistant to abstract analysis. On the side of value, the most familiar case is with beauty, where "there is no disputing taste" (de gustibus non disputandum), but where there nevertheless is at least a hierarchy of taste (since "pushpin" is not as good as poetry, pace Jeremy Bentham), and there are regularities of beauty that can identified in a formal and experimental way. On the theoretical side, "conditioned" necessity is the nomological necessity of natural law. If it is possible for the laws of nature to be different in different universes, which is a popular idea these days, then there is an arbitrary element in the natural laws of our universe. Physicists and mathematicians find this offensive, but we are probably stuck with it. The arbitrary element is what cannot be reduced to an abstract formalism. It is less intelligible. For the numinous, the vector's magnitude is only apparent in the transcendent, which leaves its phenomenal content, at zero, entirely irrational and unintelligible. Its presence, of course, is felt in the phenomenal world, which is the difference between a Kantian theory, where phenomena are simply the appearance (in consciousness) of things-in-themselves, and a Platonic theory, where the transcendent is in another world.
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