By these he meant undertakings that steered clear of grand speculative and abstract doctrines while also avoiding pedantic inquiries that were unlikely to yield significant results.
Many others have only lectures on highly abstract legal doctrines, which forces young lawyers to figure out how to actually think and write like a lawyer at their first apprenticeship (or job).
Advocacy of abstract doctrine remained protected while speech explicitly inciting the forcible overthrow of the government was punishable under the Smith Act.
Dietary laws and the wearing of phylacteries had, over the centuries, become an essential part of the Jewish experience; without these rites, Judaism would degenerate into a system of abstract doctrines.
The Court ruled that the Smith Act did not prohibit "advocacy of forcible overthrow of the government as an abstract doctrine."
Beyond that, the decision indicated that a majority of the court, albeit a narrow one, was less interested in abstract doctrine than in the practical considerations.
It is far better that, like Grant, he remembers that the true cause of the war was never really abstract political doctrine or historical theory, but slavery, which had a human face.
Further, like many great cases, this one takes the Court out of the realm of abstract doctrine, placing it at the juncture where hard questions of law, politics, civic virtue, even psychology meet.
Schweitzer never attacks an abstract anonymous doctrine.
This is part of his attempt to reconstruct a vibrant, living spirituality away from the abstract doctrines of "Euro-gentile" religion.