Realism in philosophy is diametrically opposed to Nominalism (q.v.), as involving the belief that genus and species are real things, existing independently of our conceptions and their expression, and that these are alike actually the object of our thoughts when we make use of the terms. Again, as opposed to Idealism, the word implies an intuitive cognition of the external object, instead of merely a mediate and representative knowledge of it.
In art and literature the word Realism or Naturalism is employed to describe a method of representation without idealisation, which in our day in France has been raised to a system and claims a monopoly of truth in its artistic treatment of the facts of nature and life. It claims that the enthusiasms and exaggerations of romanticism must give place to a period of reflection and criticism; that we must not select from the facts put before our eyes, but merely register them and the sensations they engender for themselves alone, apart from all considerations of mere beauty, to say nothing of religion or morality; and that the experimental romance must hereafter follow the rigid methods of science, in being based alone on 'human documents' supplied from the close observation of the present, or from laborious erudition—the retrospective observation of the past. As a gospel this militant Realism is the offspring of the Positive philosophy and the physiology and psychology of the age; and in effect, in the hands of its apostles, it has become a new morality which reforms not by precept but example, not by the attraction of the good, but by the repulsion of the evil. The practical result is that for French realists there is in the moral world only the evil, in the visible world only the ugly, and the triumphs of our modern fiction are the pitiless impersonality of Madame Bovary, the cold splendours of Salammbô, the brutal vulgarities of Zola, the refined sensualism of Bourget and Guy de Maupassant, the pretentious inanities of the Goncourt brothers, and the dreary pessimism of Dostoievsky and Tolstoi. If realism were perfect it would include all reality, order as well as disorder, the general as well as the particular, the lofty as well as the low. For there are men and women who are neither selfish nor drunken, nor lecherous; your experimental cesspool is not Paris, your Paris is not the universe; your hospital-wards may contain cases of all moral maladies, but you forget the moving world of health and life outside its walls; your vaunted collection lacks one specimen, not the rarest, and certainly the most beautiful. For the dream is as true a leaf of life as the sober vision, and idealism is the permanent revenge of man over the inequalities of life—the protest of creative mind against external fatality. Idealistic art seizes life at its richest moments, and presents it preserved for ever by its immaterial essence from inconstancy and degradation. This so-called realism is not reality—the steps of true art must ever be elimination and generalisation; its postulates, the eternal conventions of form, style, language, and subject, necessary because they are elemental.