  Anyone who thinks in terms of complex ideas can see that these can be framed easily in different ways, none of which need correspond to anything found in the external world: combine the ideas of a man and a horse, as Locke had suggested, and you have the idea of a centaur. No one who reads romances would find difficulty in imagining a society differing beyond recognition from its current arrangements. A classic instance of political imagination, indeed, is Burke's own Vindication of Natural Society, which presents as an alternative model of society an organization—if that is the word—devoid of civil government, church and significant private property.