Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.

What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.

Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.