The Consequences of Monism 237be said of all transcendent principles based on thinking
that has not been experienced.
In truth, the human spirit never moves beyond the real-
ity in which we live. Nor does it need to, for everything
needed to explain the world lies within it. If philosophers
declare themselves content in the end with the derivation
of the world from principles borrowed from experience
and displaced into a hypothetical Beyond, then such sat-
isfaction should also be possible if the same content is left
here, where it must be for the kind of thinking that we can
experience. Every transcendence beyond this world is
only apparent; and the principles transposed outside the
world explain the world no better than those lying within
it. Nor does thinking that understands itself demand any
such transcendence, since it is only within the world, not
outside it, that a thought content must seek a perceptual
content together with which it can form something real.
The objects of imagination, too, are merely contents; they
find their justification only in becoming mental pictures
that point to a perceptual content. Through that perceptual
content, the objects of imagination integrate themselves
into reality. A concept supposedly filled with a content,
and lying outside the world given to us, is an abstraction
and corresponds to no reality. We can think only the con-
cepts of reality; to find reality itself, we also need to per-
ceive. For thinking that understands itself, a primordial
essence of the world whose content isinvented is an im-
possible assumption. Monism does not deny the concep-
tual. On the contrary, it even regards a perceptual content
lacking its conceptual counterpart as falling short of the