"Things" can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities, and their attributes.
"Ideas" have reality. They are what we can know, and we can know nothing else.
An idea is energy shaped by consciousness. It is the smallest unit of mental process; it is a difference, a distinction, or news of a difference.
We build models of the world in our mind, using the data from our sense organs and the information-processing capabilities of our brain. We habitually think of the world we see as "out there," but what we are seeing is really a mental model, a perceptual simulation that exists only in our brain.
What we mean by the word "world" usually is the world encompassed by human communications. The world was one thing when word seeped around from tribe to tribe. It became another when traders and religious enthusiasts set forth journeying. So it progressed through centuries--mail service, print, telegraph, telephone, electronic credit. Each time the means of communication advanced, the "world" metamorphosed.
In any epoch there are always fundamental assumptions which are unconsciously presupposed. In our own period many of us continue to live in unexamined assumptions about reality. We take the visible to be real and the invisible to be unreal. But in a very meaningful sense, we are invisible. Consciousness and self-consciousness, for example, are entirely invisible, without odor, color, sound, taste, or smell. All our thoughts, emotions, and feelings are invisible, yet it is these interior features we identify with most and take ourselves at heart to be. To quote Houston Smith, "It would be an oversimplification to say that we are completely invisible, for we do have bodies, but as between oversimplifications, it is literally more accurate to say that we are invisible than to say the opposite."
We adjust not to the reality of a world but to the reality of other thinkers.
Remember, we interact with reality through language, not directly. Language is a buffer between us and nature. When we interact with a tree--for example, when we cut one down to help heat our home--we don't think in terms of the millions of interactive elements and minerals and processes of continuous change that constitute a tree. If anything, the somewhat grosser concepts of thick bark, sawdust, and wood may pass through our mind. In other words, we can't react to and manipulate reality directly, we adjust to the reality of other thinkers, other speakers. In this sense reality is the structure that our subjective sense of self holds in consciousness.