objects are wholly independent of any ideas which may have them as objects, just in so far as these ideas are different from their objects.
To countless and to endlessly various objects this first form of the ontological predicate has accordingly been applied by the thinkers who have used it. Both matter and mind have equally been called real in this first sense. Realism has, of course, no necessary tendency towards Materialism, although the materialists are realists. Since all here turns upon the ontological predicate, and not upon the what of the subject to which a given realistic philosopher applies this ontological predicate, you never know in advance but that a realist’s world may prove to be full of minds. By way of illustration of the varieties of Realism, I may refer at once to typical entities of realistic type which have appeared in the course of the history of philosophy. The Eleatic One, and the Many of Empedocles or of Democritus; the Platonic Ideas, in the form in which Plato defines them in his most typical accounts of their supreme and absolute dignity as real beings; and the Aristotelian individual beings of all grades, from God to matter; the Stoic Nature and the Epicurean atoms; the whole world of created entities in the Scholastic theology, whenever viewed apart from its dependence upon God; the Substance of Spinoza; the Monads of Leibniz; the Things in Themselves of Kant; the Reals of Herbart; The Mind Stuff of Clifford; the Unknowable of Mr. Spencer; and even the moral agents of most modern ethical systems of metaphysics: — all these endlessly varied types of conceived objects, differing in value and in description almost
