Meanings of ideal types in English

English literature has always been more sympathetic with actual beings than with ideal types, and cannot help us much.

Plato had a concept of an ideal community, of ideal types of necessary men, and of ideal male-female breeding relationships.

Thus the intensely masculine is completed by the delicately feminine, and the artist shows us ideal types of manhood and womanhood.

They are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types of imagination fail of humanization because they are thus fragmentarily, but consistently, presented.

Those are ideal types: in the real world, any Catholic will be a mixture of those orientations, but in most of them, one will predominate.