They are supposed to be mature, and it is on this necessary supposition that their adulthood justifiably rests. - R. W. K. Paterson

We need constantly to compare our evaluation of the patrician character with the portraits of him painted by others who have tried to show us how a patrician distinctively comports himself and especially, from within, what distinctive manner of consciousness he evinces; for it is in the analyses of philosophers, the parables of religious teachers, the perceptions of poets, novelists and dramatists, and indeed often in the songs and symphonies of musicians, that he can be made to arise and speak to us and can assure us that the concepts of nobility we have formed do full justice to the reality. And when we have found his speaking likeness, he will surely not fail to address us, reminding us of a world which we had half forgotten and in the existence of which, perhaps, we had almost come to disbelieve.

Although he [the plebeian] cannot deny that selfless courage and unswerving rectitude—indeed all the qualities of the patrician—exist as dreams in men’s minds, his mission is to destroy any belief that they have ever influenced, or ever could influence, the motive, character, and conduct of actual men and women. Whenever such ideals are put before us, he wants us to react to them as simply unbelievable.

When we entrust the domain of values to those whose intellectual concerns are essentially centred on empirical facts, and whose conceptual frameworks are inevitably constructed around sets of empirical facts, we need not be surprised if the result is moral confusion.