[T]hey are the offspring of experience... instinct with blood and breath and vitality.... They are not propositions, conceived in the understanding and addressed to life, but propositions born of life itself, and addressed to the heart. They were not conceived in the minds of the great few, but they sprang from the life of the people.

Holland contrasts ideas that are merely abstract—“conceived in the understanding”—with convictions that arise from lived reality. The “offspring of experience” are portrayed as organic, embodied truths: they carry “blood and breath,” and therefore speak not just to reason but to feeling, conscience, and communal memory (“addressed to the heart”). He also emphasizes a democratic origin of such truths: they are not the inventions of elites (“the great few”) but emerge from collective life (“the people”). The passage thus defends the authority of popular, experiential wisdom over purely theoretical formulations, suggesting that the most enduring principles are those tested and generated by real human struggle and shared social life.