The initial experience is sense experience, not rational experience. What can you rationalize about if you do not have no experience of the world? Suppose someone from birth was in a coma. They are normal except having no sense input. Effectively they are a brain in a vat. For the idealist that would be a perfect world. The only conclusion to draw is the world is not in the mind but the mind is in the world. But does the mind exist in any way at all? If it did, and if thought is all that is necessary then again purely mental rational world is the ideal world. So the other non-mind world exists, firstly, and is necessary, or existent. The world was not created or generated to facilitate mind. It is the opposite. What do I experience? There are things. What else do I experience? There is space which is inferred from the relationship of things. And there is time which is inferred from the change in the relationship of things in inferred space. To infer is not to say they do not exist, but that I do not experience space and time without experiencing things. Inference is to say indirect experience and knowledge of space and time. Reality (the world) is the totality of things, space and time. There are purely physical things without thought or language, like rocks. There are also physical things which have thoughts about world, like dogs. And there are physical things which have thoughts and communicate about the world, like humans. These categories are not hierarchical but of difference in kind. I am a physical thing of the thinking communicating kind. I am a thing of the world. Human experience is of the physical world (the reality of things), thoughts (concepts), and language (symbols). Reality is the base. Whether you think or communicate or not is irrelevant to reality’s realism. Thinking and communication only contribute to our knowledge of it.