Such a programme for a treatise on government might lead us to expect in the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or ideal state which might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon political institutions.
His ideal is constructed not of pure reason or poetry, but from careful and sympathetic study of a wide range of facts.
But the
ideals he most revered in those days are no longer held to be the highest types of men.
I left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my
ideal.
He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the
ideal of his dreams.
So to say, we would split the difference between the
ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.
As counter-examples, there are numerous schools of Buddhism, some of which DO offer a type of heaven; and the Confucian
ideal of reciprocity can easily be, and often has been, misinterpreted in the same way as Semitic religions.
Their ardor alternated between a vague
ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy
ideal of a woman that his mother had been.
Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood--the culture of ennui for its own sake--is certainly carried to its
ideal of negation by Amiel.
The higher virtue, which is identical with knowledge, is an
ideal only.
Conquest of Granada', but still a passion, and I should dread a little to read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old
ideal of its beauty.
