Those who, like Browning, make a division between man’s thought and real things, and regard the sphere of knowledge as touching at no point the sphere of actual existence, are attributing to the bare human intellect much more power than it has.  They regard mind as creating its phenomenal knowledge, or the apparent world.  For, having separated mind from reality, it is evident that they cannot avail themselves of any doctrine of sensations or impressions as a medium between them, or postulate any other form of connection or means of communication.  Connection of any kind must, in the end, imply some community of nature, and must put the unity of thought and being—­here denied—­beneath their difference.  Hence, the world of phenomena which we know, and which as known, does not seem to consist of realities, must be the product of the unaided human mind.  The intellect, isolated from all real being, has manufactured the apparent universe, in all its endless wealth.  It is a creative intellect, although it can only create illusions.  It evolves all its products from itself.

But thought, set to revolve upon its own axis in an empty region, can produce nothing, not even illusions.  And, indeed, those who deny that it is possible for thought and reality to meet in a unity, have, notwithstanding, to bring over “something” to the aid of thought.  There must be some effluence from the world of reality, some manifestations of the thing (though they are not the reality of the thing, nor any part of the reality, nor connected with the reality!) to assist the mind and supply it with data.  The “phenomenal world” is a hybrid, generated by thought and “something”—­which yet is not reality; for the real world is a world of things in themselves, altogether beyond thought.  By bringing in these data, it is virtually admitted that the human mind reaches down into itself in vain for a world, even for a phenomenal one.

Thought apart from things is quite empty, just as things apart from thought are blind.  Such thought and such reality are mere abstractions, hypostasized by false metaphysics; they are elements of truth rent asunder, and destroyed in the rending.  The dependence of the intelligence of man upon reality is direct and complete.  The foolishest dream, that ever played out its panorama beneath a night-cap, came through the gates of the senses from the actual world.  Man is limited to his material in all that he knows, just as he is ruled by the laws of thought.  He cannot go one step beyond it.  To transcend “experience” is impossible.  We have no wings to sustain us in an empty region, and no need of any.  It is as impossible for man to create new ideas, as it is for him to create new atoms.  Our thought is essentially connected with reality.  There is no mauvais pas from thought to things.  We do not need to leap out of ourselves in order to get into the world.  We are in it from the first, both as physical and moral agents, and as thinking beings.  Our thoughts are expressions of the real nature of things, so far as they go.  They may be and are imperfect; they may be and are confused and inadequate, and express only the superficial aspects and not “the inmost fibres”; still, they are what they are, in virtue of “the reality,” which finds itself interpreted in them.  Severed from that reality, they would be nothing.