He agreed with Brentano and Meinong that consciousness involved awareness in the form of an act of intending something other than itself. Moore claimed that the act of consciousness included both a nonmental, independent object and a transparent, or 'diaphanous,' mental act of consciousness. The differences were particularly noticeable in their statements about the nature of consciousness and of its object, and of the relation between them. In both America and England, New Realists asserted the independence of consciousness and its object, but serious differences soon appeared between the two groups and between individuals within each group. In England, New Realism took explicit form in the works of T. The movement took definite form when Montague and Perry were joined by four others in a statement of a New Realist program ('The Program and First Platform of Six Realists') in 1910. Their immediate aim was to refute Josiah Royce's 'refutation' of realism, which he had based on the claim that the knower and the known could not be independent of each other and still be related.

In America the movement known as New Realism dates from the critical writings of William P. Similar realist polemics were taking place in Sweden and Italy. Developing mainly as a polemic against Idealism, this new realism was represented prior to 1900 in England in the works of such men as John Cook Wilson, Thomas Case, H. The Austrian philosophers Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong first enunciated the cardinal tenet of this new realism: that what the mind knows or perceives exists independently of the acts of knowing and perceiving. 'New Realism' arose at the turn of the twentieth century in opposition to the Idealist doctrines that the known or perceived object is dependent for its existence on the act of knowing and that the immediately perceived object is a state of the perceiving mind.

Aesthetic realism in literature