now. He's just a means. Just a
very aggressive and unmanageable means. This isn't a plumber's job...."

I stuck to my argument.

"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me
at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking....

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that
our philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable
difference,--once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid
of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated,
accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely
assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow
my outlines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling
always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and
metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I
know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green
shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly
irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer as
time went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at
Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have
always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of
Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon
a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general
laws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic
sense--which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word "Realists."
They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals.
This is the common habit of all so-called educated people who have no
metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. It leads them to a
progressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trick
of Altiora's to speak of everybody as a "type"; she saw men as samples
moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gave
a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using
"scientific" in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense,
an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in
terms of actuality and the people one knew....

At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very
strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affect
this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin and sham