In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid … - Lancelot Law Whyte

The Christian fog of self deception still does its damage: we either deceive ourselves by pretending to believe or overreact into a contempt of all religion. So, away with the fog!

The failure of idealistic thought lay partly in the fact that it did not recognize that every ideal is linked to its shadow. [...] Whatever is incomplete is thus always complemented by its contrary; the penalty for any principle which fails to express the whole is the necessity to co-exist with its opposite. Partial love implies partial hate; spirit, sensuality; self-sacrificing compassion, sadism. The denial of any aspect sharpens and preserves it, while its acceptance transforms it by bringing it within the process of the whole. (p. 254)

The ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness represent attempts to interpret the process of development as a group of tendencies permanently directed towards certain permanent and universal ends. But human behaviour is not directed towards unchanging ends, not even towards those temporary ideals which each community sets up for itself. The formative tendency is displayed, not in any steady process of definite orientation, but in a rhythmic sequence of transformation which cannot be represented as tending towards any particular final condition. (p. 261-262)