  After observing the fact of thought, Rosmini concludes that its absolute basis, without which nothing is thought and thought is nothing, must be the knowledge of being. Reflection can remove everything from thought, and still leave it embryonically sound provided the mind is granted the idea of being as its governing light. This idea, which possesses the divine attributes of universality, infinity, necessity and possibility, is not God himself but merely the possibility of things. Moreover, it acts in the mind, but without becoming a subjective part of the mind. As intellectual light, it illuminates, but from outside the mind. And it illuminates without revealing its source, as natural light can be seen without our looking at the sun. It is, as Dante would say, ‘the light connecting intellect and truth’ (Purgatorio 6: 45) and, as such, is the quasi-form of the intellect and the image of truth. Determinations of this idea, all of which possess in some way the characteristics of being, especially its objectivity, are provided through sensations experienced in the animal part of human existence and illuminated, being-wise, through the innate idea in which they are seen. Of themselves, sensations do not constitute knowledge but, when felt in the human subject, provide the matter of knowledge which determines the idea of being, that is, the form of knowledge. Knowledge consists first in the intuition of being, the universal, and then in a subsequent series of judgments, or direct perceptions, through which knowing subjects affirm the actual existence of what they have experienced sensationally. These direct perceptions cannot err, although reflection upon them, and a subsequent series of judgments, may be the source of error. In a word, Rosmini holds that basic knowledge, consisting of the idea of being and its immediate determinations, provides all that is needed for objective thought. Against idealists, he reduces the formal requirements of thought to the intuition of being; against sensationalists, he maintains the per se inadequacy of the senses to provide more than the matter of thought.