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Realism Realism is the theory that everything exists independent of thought or knowledge. Everything is independent from the mind or what people think. A realist would say that if a tree fell in the forest, even if no one heard it or ever knew that the tree fell, it still made a sound. When a tree falls there is going to be sound regardless of whether someone hears it or not. The origin of realism finds its roots with Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.). He was the first person to really say that the basic constituents of every object were form and matter. Modern ideas of realism however, came largely through the influence of Francis Bacon’s (1561 – 1626) inductive methodology and John Locke’s (1632 – 1704) proposal that the human mind is developed through environment and experiences. For the realist, it is the physical world in which we live that makes up reality, not what we think in our minds. Realism is based upon our senses, what we can see, hear, and fe