Grasping the whole

I checked Sparrow's entry this morning at Mercy Street and saw she had posted a quote from the Friend/Quaker Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion, which I had bought just yesterday.

Douglas V. Steere begins his biography of Kelly, which is included as a preface to Testament, with these sentences:

An adequate life, like Spinoza's definition of an adequate idea, might be described as a life which has grasped intuitively the whole nature of things, and has seen and felt and refocused itself to this whole. An inadequate life is one that lacks this adjustment to the whole nature of things—hence its twisted perspective, its partiality, its confusion.