Collectors of ideas

  What I hope to find, when I come to read the book, is that you have formed a single, articulated, consistent, whole; a whole such that no one part can be modified without affecting the rest. It is not so important that it should be correct[a]—that can only come later—, but unless one's thinking is all-of-a-piece there is, properly speaking, no thinking at all. A person who simply makes a collection—however vast—of ideas, and does not perceive that they are at variance with one another, has actually no ideas of his own; and if one attempts to instruct him (which is to say, to alter him) one merely finds that one is adding to the junk-heap of assorted notions without having any other effect whatsoever. As Kierkegaard has said, 'Only the truth that edifies is truth for you.' (CUP, p. 226) Nothing that one can say to these collectors of ideas is truth for them. What is wanted is a man who will argue a single point, and go on arguing it until the matter is clear to him, because he sees that everything else depends upon it. With such a person communication (i.e., of truth that edifies) can take place.