A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.

Man is merely a frequent effect, a monstrosity is a rare one, but both are equally natural, equally inevitable, equally part of the universal and general order. And what is strange about that? All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species... all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal... There is nothing clearly defined in nature.

The first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more complicated.

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?

Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.