Ideas are presented not in isolation and detachment, but in their totality of origin and relationship; they are not abstractions, general propositions, philosophical generalisations; they are living truths--truths, that is, which have become clear by long experience, and to which men stand, or have stood, in personal relations.

They are ideas, in other words, which stand together, not in the order of formal logic, but of the "logic of free life." They are not torn out of their normal relations; they bring all their relationships with them.

We are offered a plant in the soil, not a flower cut from its stem.

Every man is rooted to the soil, touches through his senses the physical, and through his mind and heart the spiritual, order of his time; all these influences are focussed in him, and according to his capacity he gathers them into his experience, formulates and expresses them.

The greater and more productive the man, the wider his contact with and absorption of the life of his time.