This audiobook has been called The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-Day in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical, here-and-now nature of its subject and especially to combat the idea that the spiritual life - or the mystic life, as its more intense manifestations are sometimes called - is to be regarded as primarily a matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology.

Though we cannot disregard history in our study of it, that history will only be valuable to us insofar as we keep tight hold on its direct connection with the present, its immediate bearing on our own lives. This we shall do only insofar as we realize the unity of all the higher experiences of the race. In fact, were I called upon to choose a motto that should express the central notion of these chapters, that motto would be: "There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit."

This declaration I would interpret in the widest possible sense; as suggesting the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful sense, of the tangle of material that is before us until we have subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent object toward which all our twisting pathways run, with one impulsion pressing us toward it.