But, it may be insisted, we are still only talking about consciousness; let us come to "real" things. Suppose no one able to distinguish between them, abstract all consciousness of difference, would not two "real" things remain two, however we might confound them? Can a thing in one place be a thing in another place, however closely it may resemble it, or however ignorant we may be? To this I answer that when one speaks of _two_ "real" things the words only mean something to him because he has present in mind what I have said must be present if one is to have a consciousness of duality. A "thing in one place" and a "thing in another place" are to him two simply because he thinks them as differing--in place. When one has come to the conclusion that he must duplicate his experience, distinguish between the world of immediate and the world of mediate objects, and place the latter in a region "outside," there is nothing to prevent him from thinking of two "real" things as two, although all distinctions within the field of immediate objects have been obliterated. Still, in thinking these "real" things as two, he does just what he does in thinking two immediate objects as two--he recognizes difference. The twoness depends upon difference as much in the one case as in the other, and to speak of two objects in a "real" world as two and yet having no differing element would be to use words without meaning. In talking about a "real" world, if we are really to talk and not merely to utter a series of sounds, our words must be significant. To say "this or that may be in a 'real' world, though we may not be able to conceive it," would, if "this" or "that" implies a contradiction, be to say nothing. The fact is that this "external" world, as we think it, implies the notions of before and after, in this place and that, all the distinctions and differences which make it to us a world of distinct objects. Of course it follows that things in the "external" world are thought as distinct from each other, but this does not affect my statement that distinction is impossible without difference.