We should consider whether he makes them (1) merely caricatures, or (2) type characters, standing for certain general traits of human nature but not convincingly real or especially significant persons, or (3) genuine individuals with all the inconsistencies and half-revealed tendencies that in actual life belong to real personality.
It may also be asked whether the characters are simple, as some people are in actual life, or complex, like most interesting persons; whether they develop, as all real people must under the action of significant experience, or whether the author merely presents them in brief situations or lacks the power to make them anything but stationary.
The mixed constitution will be stable if it represents the actual balance of power between different classes in the state.
He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate or from which they are perversions.
We wanted to teach them to study actual things instead of mere books alone.
The more we saw of them, and the more we travelled through the country districts, the more we saw that our efforts were reaching, to only a partial degree, the actual needs of the people whom we wanted to lift up through the medium of the students whom we should education and send out as leaders.
"Let us observe, my friends," continued Barbicane, "that if in the
actual state of the moon its long nights and long days created differences of temperature insupportable to organization, it was not so at the historical period of time.
The primitive non-cognitive element in desire seems to be a push, not a pull, an impulsion away from the
actual, rather than an attraction towards the ideal.
Another part can only be attained, or at least thoroughly attained, by
actual experience in the station which requires the use of it.
And the
actual direction of the wind was driving him along to the kingdom of Dahomey, among the most savage races, and into the power of a ruler who was in the habit of sacrificing thousands of human victims at his public orgies.
"No, but he's so used to a spiritual life that he can't reconcile himself with
actual fact, and Varenka is after all fact."
Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the
Actual as Phoebe's did.
It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian inva- sion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the
actual Martian condition.
