In this chapter, the author proposes to give a definition of a word with which every student of philosophy must sooner or later come to grips, namely, realism. In philosophy objective definitions are neither easy to come by nor identical with other definitions, and the difference between philosophical and other definitions is a difference to which we should pay particular attention at the outset. Objective meaning is the same as historical meaning. The distinction between two spheres, one subjective and the other objective, it may perhaps be disconcerting to remind ourselves that such a distinction is foreign to early Greek philosophical thought. Modern realism affirms that order and system reside in the objective world; and it is so anxious that this world shall owe nothing to any other source that it deprives the mind of almost all character, until the latter becomes a kind of photographic plate passively receptive of outside stimuli.