But if one decides to start with Descartes and finish with Aristotle, and to employ an idealist method while shamelessly making use of a reality one has no right to, one brings confusion into the heart of philosophy and makes its cultivation impossible. To make it possible again is the reason why realists are realists and call themselves such. They too follow a method, but they do not lay down beforehand what that method is to be, as though it were a necessary pre-condition for their philosophy. Instead, they find their method in their philosophy. So they never have to ask themselves whether it is legitimate to transform their method into a metaphysics, because their method is that metaphysics, which is fully aware of its proceedings, of its initial positions, and of their implications.
