We cannot find out what a home is by looking at actual instances of homes, since we cannot even begin to pick these out as putatively instances of ‘h… - R. W. K. Paterson

It is rare to find the ideal of the patrician standing alone, not joining hands, albeit unavoidably and sometimes most reluctantly, with the ideals of very different human types. Even Plato’s Guardians, who have had the vision of The Good, are presented first of all as ideals rulers of earthly men, although Plato will soon openly declare that the commonwealth of which they are master is ‘set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, to found one in himself, and whether it exists or ever will exist is no matter, for this is the only commonwealth in who politics he can ever take part’.

Ideals are not summaries of the empirical facts about human personality and behaviour: they are the standards by reference to which we pass judgment on the facts. Since ideals are not empirical generalizations, to cite counterinstances, however plentiful, would merely be to betray one’s total failure to understand the nature of the subject-matter under discussion.

Rebellion is a way of being alive. A consciousness of evil, needful to be combated … is one of our most vivid forms of consciousness. If evil did not exist we should have to invent it, as indeed we do in works of the imagination. … A man who had never rebelled would be a man who did not know what it was to be alive.