All human thought can be put on a spectrum ranging from logic and reasoning to creativity and expression. It has always been in man's nature to study his environment through some form of observation and reasoning. Man has also always felt the need to create in order to express himself. The result of this is that all of the modern day societal obligations can be fit somewhere along the spectrum ranging from science and art. For example, salesmanship requires skills with logic and numbers, but it also requires persuasion of customers, for which there is no formulaic method. There is a third category of thought, however, and it encompasses all that is not only beyond our scientific knowledge, but beyond our human comprehension entirely; it can never be grasped by humans entirely. It represents all that is divine and understood only by God. Religion is a human attempt to understand some of it. Another attempt can be seen in the Romatic literature movement. The works and lives of Romantic authors John Keats and Henry David Thoreau show a yearning to understand what is beyond human senses and thought capability.

John Keats, in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," shows a desire to escape from his reality. In "Ode to a Nightingale," he expresses a desire to leave the world and go into the world beyond human reality, as the nightingale does, "That I might drink, and leave the world unseen/ And with thee fade away into the forest dim (19-20)." In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the fact that Keats' speaker is speaking to an urn shows desire to go beyond reality (It is not that he creates stories for the pictures on the urn that shows his yearning for the world beyond human reality. While his stories require much imagination, imagination is part of human understanding. It is his speaking to the urn that shows his connection to the world beyond human reality). When newborn infants come into the world, they have just taken up a form with human limitations. Before they come into the world, they are (according to Romantic ideals) still among the divine and have divine understanding. As soon as newborns begin the process of learning the facts of human reality and society, they lose their divine knowledge. Someone who would speak to the urn expecting to accomplish something would have no knowledge of the reality that inanimate objects do not speak. It can be inferred as a result that that person has not been in human form for very long, so he still has divine knowledge. No one other than Keats himself can possibly be the speaker in his poem due to the absence of personal pronouns, so Keats himself is talking to the urn. In talking to the urn, he is using negative capability to try to make himself forget the reality that he will accomplish nothing. By doing this, he is trying to see divine knowledge beyond human comprehension. It is easy to see why Keats wants to escape reality; his entire immediate family died during his lifetime.

Henry David Thoreau decided to live in nature away from the society that man expects everyone to follow. In doing this, he was attempting to let go of the human reality that is society so that he may regain the divine understanding he had when he first came into the world. He would attempt to live in a way that was as close as possible to purely instinctive by a human who had no influence from other humans. To do this, he had to forget everything society had taught him about man's reality and limitations.