John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend

...I have never known," Dewey says, "a more single-hearted and whole-souled man...

...But that crisis, so far as concerns religion, seems to have been passed through and a working adjustment arrived at before he came to Huxley...

...For the first of those years I dined at his home every Sunday, and we spent the afternoon and often the evenning conversing together...

...The University of Paris, in conferring a degree upon him in 1930, described him as "the most profound and complete expression of American genius...

...I attended his course of lectures on Logical Theory and another on modern Philosophy...

...I tried to work up a little affair with my cousin when I was 19," he told me...

...That is half of who John Dewey was, and the other half was a philosopher in the technical sense—a man who made his living arguing about such questions as "How We Think" and "What Does Thought Do to Being...

...It contained too many pious wishes, too much that could not be verified...

...He had decided, to put it in his own words, that "any genuinely sound religious experience could and should adapt itself to whatever beliefs one found oneself intellectually entitled to hold...

...It was not deity, however, that Dewey was worried about after he read Huxley...

...he merely inquired of Harris whether it showed signs of promise...

...One was Dewey's perverse and obdurate neglect of it...

...He never blew his own horn and never listened when kind friends undertook to blow it for him...

...Whatever the cause, the effect was long-lasting...

...As a result, his senior year at college was an ardent effort and adventure...

...He had no sex problems...

...Many years before natural scientists began to see the world as in process of evolution, Hegel was ready for them with his theory that God himself is a world in process of evolution...

...Or perhaps an overemphasis on evangelical morals had given me a feeling of alienation from the world...

...and yet he could not deny the validity of Huxley's account of how material forces shaped it...

...I claim I've got religion," he said, "and that I got it that night in Oil City...

...That accidental contact with Darwin's brilliant disciple, then waging his fierce war for evolution against the "impregnable rock" of Holy Scripture, woke John Dewey up to the spectacular excitement of the effort to understand the world...

...And then finally, I interviewed him three or four times, a notebook in my hand, with a view to writing this portrait of him and of the development of his ideas...

...At the end of the year Dewey's cousin resigned her job, and his went with it...

...There were books in the village library that he liked better...

...And he was falling in love with Hegel...

...and he was aroused to philosophic speculation by Thomas Henry Huxley, the "prophet of science...

...The school, in consequence, had begun to change from a place where children prepare for life . . . to a place where children live...

...To put it in his own words to me: " I was reacting against the too moralistic morals in which I had been brought up, and trying to find something that would be more objective, more like physical science...

...She had been brought up a Universalist...

...Perhaps that was it...

...Reading dime novels and playing marbles for keeps were immoral, but dancing and card playing were not...

...I was unduly bashful and self-conscious," he said, "always putting myself over against other people...

...I helped him revise the English and improve the expression of his thoughts in his chapters of the book on ethics which he wrote in collaboration with Professor Tufts...

...But he never had any doubt about the supreme importance of "being good," and helped along by bashfulness, he managed not only to teach it but achieve it...

...The crisis was a short course in physiology with a textbook written by Thomas Henry Huxley...

...His brainy big brother...

...There seemed to be some separation, some gap, some intimately ominous chasm here, over which this lanky, mild, shy, blackeyed boy yearned in the intense way that most boys do over the yawning gulf that separates them from the body of their best girl...

...adapted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...

...One evening while he sat reading he had what he called a "mystic experience...

...A. S. Dewey—Archibald Sprague is the name—was the daughter of "Squire Rich" of Richville, and her grandfather had been in Congress...

...He had been in painful tension...

...His scheme was, in brief, to say that all reality, good and bad together, is the Divine Spirit in a process of inward, and also onward and upward, struggle toward the realization of its own free and complete being...

...nor any beliefs...

...SINCE THIS memoir takes the form of a story of Dewey's life rather than of my meetings with him, it may be well to describe our association in general terms...

...In more technical terms, the problem I was at work on, and have been all my life, is whether there is any common method applicable both to the material and the human sciences...

...which means one of fifty to sixty thousand Christians kindhearted enough to believe we shall all be saved—a far cry from Calvin's doctrine of the Elect of God which did so much to keep New England mean and snobbish...

...It was not God but man that Dewey was worried about...

...I submitted to him my Ph.D...

...He worked fairly hard during school hours, but only because he didn't want to carry his textbooks home...

...He also guessed that it was not necessary for an American who wanted a philosophical education to study in Germany...

...It was in 1881, his first year at Johns Hopkins, that Dewey was rapt away by Hegel, and he remained pretty Hegelian for 10 or 12 years, coming back to earth, appropriately enough, in the vicinity of Chicago in the early '90s...

...just a routine performance...

...He could not abandon thinking about human life as a thing to be shaped by moral will and meditation...

...he was swept off his feet by the rapture of scientific knowledge...

...But I couldn't do it...

...It is generally assumed to be an effort to go behind the returns made by science...

...Besides surviving this himself, he surprised them one morning by going out an extra two hundred feet and rescuing, in a deferential way, a drowning woman...

...Notwithstanding his popularity, A. S. Dewey never got along very well because it hurt his feelings to ask people to pay their bills...

...Hegel's metaphysics gave him back the sense "of unity, of things flowing together...

...He had found a wonderful teacher, a Hegelian named George Sylvester Morris...

...That netted him a dollar a week, and in the summer when he reached 14, he got a real job "tallying" in a lumber yard, which netted him six dollars...

...I think...

...He led his class and got the highest marks on record in philosophy...

...I studied under him at Columbia for three years, teaching logic under his supervision and occupying an office next to his with the door usually open between us...

...To keep going while he worked on it, he took another job, this time teaching in the little district schoolhouse in Charlotte, Vermont...

...Dewey thought he probably would not have gone to college if there hadn't been a college right there in Burlington to slide into...

...She had attended revivals in her youth, and was, to quote her son's exact language, "not emotionally repressed and not austere, but pretty moralistic...

...Sixty years later, when the whole thing seemed to him a sentimental German self-deception, he still felt a pious love toward Hegel, and groped for words that might express the emotion of release that this mystical conception of the cosmos gave him...

...Harris was what they called a "lay philosopher," and Dewey, although still a churchgoer, was "lay" enough to send his first original work to Harris...

...Davis R.—an economist, who had a longer section in Who's Who than John had—came down to live and study with him...

...Up in Nova Scotia, where he went in summer, he still kept the local people in a dither by swimming in all weathers in the deeps of Solar Lake...

...But he remained perfectly healthy, and couldn't quite remember what it was all about...

...To forestall your own remark, he would remind you that it was very likely a sublimation of sex, and point out that this didn't make it any less normal or important...

...A sign outside reading "Hams and Cigars—Smoked and Unsmoked" apprised his customers that they would not be taken too seriously...

...The memoir appears as a chapter in Great Companions, to be published April 9. (Copyright by Max Eastman 1942, 1959...

...As an example of social behavior, I don't know but it is characteristic of Vermont...

...he described it to me as a "trying personal crisis...

...I do not mean that he had rejected religion, or denied all meaning, as Huxley did, to the word God...

...but why there should be any things at all, or any telling about them, science can not decide...

...Is sounds like a misfortune, and perhaps on a long-time estimate of John Dewey it will prove to have been one...

...It was not, however, a problem that anybody in Burlington was just then offering money to have solved...

...He liked to play, but was no good at "set games"—not competitive enough...

...It is unusual for a Hegelian to recover at 35...

...His father was famous in a small way as a joker...

...What the others do, for the most part, is to think up ways of mitigating the rather desolate conception of things arrived at by science...

...Not only was his own style dull, but this dullness infected everybody who had anything to say about his theories of education...

...But the Riches hadn't gotten along very well in a property sense, either, and John's boyhood home was run on lines of watchful thrift...

...Instead, he borrowed books and used the oil in a lamp...

...Thorstein Veblen also tried for one and failed...

...This fact, combined with the moralistic inculcations of his mother, enabled John Dewey to make his start in life as an impeccable Sunday-school teacher...

...He also got a job teaching the history of philosophy to undergraduates...

...And philosophy is a large thing, not easy to define...

...For another year I served by his appointment as his assistant in philosophy...

...They were entirely filled up, from morning to midnight, with philosophy...

...Even when you get it out of the hands of the clergymen, metaphysics is still largely, as Feuerbach remarked, a "disguised theology...

...If he wanted any spending money he had to earn it—which he did, as befitted a complete expression of American genius, by delivering papers after school...

...John Dewey may best be described as the man who saved our children from dying of boredom, as we almost did in school...

...At his occasional cocktail parties on Central Park West, which were attended by a motley aggregation of all ages, faiths, colors and social positions, from grandmothers of Ethical Culture to prophets of the ultimate wrinkle in modern painting, he always seemed the most agile person piesent—agile in pretending to remember who they all were, agile in sliding around among them with the drinks...

...That Professor Morris, who led him into this philosophy, was a man of rare moral character, a man as good if not as "moralistic" as his mother, was not accidental...

...If Dewey had not been such a hopeless extrovert, we might have a little more light on this philosophical romance—or if he had been sick and gone to a psychoanalyst...

...A reform which might be described as a grown-up formulation of the necessity, long known to lively-minded children, of raising hell in school, was put over in the language of the prosiest of disciplinary pedagogues...

...His daughter and collaborator, Evelyn, read the manuscript and helped me with comments and suggestions, but Dewey himself never examined it...

...Perhaps Dewey's origin had something to do with this...

...At times he seemed to his classmates, when answering a question, to be somewhat diffidently explaining the lesson to the professor...

...The other thing that made Dewey's fame surprising was the total lack of fireworks in his nature...

...He was a great reader, but did not care for "set lessons," either...

...If I could, I could write something about adolescence that really would be interesting...

...IT WAS toward the end of his junior year that this placid process of development was crashed into by an event that unsettled the whole scheme, and may be described as the chief crisis or turning point of John Dewey's life...

...There would be a career for one, he guessed, by the time he got ready to have it...

...Only it takes a very hardworking soul to get the hang of it...

...John was an excellent whist player—and he would, in my opinion, have shone still more brilliantly at poker—but not so bright a light, it seems, on the dance floor...

...If they stay up that long, they generally get lost in the stratosphere...

...That much of a technical nature is necessary if you want to know John Dewey's life story...

...he slid into Vermont University at the early age of 15—an unusual accomplishment, but one which caused no particular comment, least of all from him...

...To me faith means not worrying...

...Everything that's here is here, and you can just lie back on it...

...Some "sense of separation," some "dividedness," or "loneliness," as though the world were out off from his soul, or he himself were cut off from the world, had troubled him...

...One of the few exceptions was W. T. Harris, who published a Journal of Speculative Philosophy in St...

...He found himself back in Burlington with a new tranquillity in his heart, but still the old tension in his head about that chasm that he saw yawning between the material and moral sciences...

...I was too bashful...

...He had to do chores around the house besides, and got punished when he chiseled with an appeal to conscience, which he found more painful than a licking...

...He saw that by comparison with the hard implacable body of fact presented by Huxley, there was something soft and unconvincing about Christian ethics—about the whole "spiritual" way of discussing human problems...

...When it was accepted for publication, he decided that he would become a lay philosopher too...

...Nothing more prodigiously ingenious was ever invented by the mind of man than this Hegelian scheme for defending soulfulness against science...

...He read and labored far into the night...

...he was pained one Sunday when in the midst of praver the question rose up in is mind: "Isn't this, after all...

...Vermonlers have a dry humor of understatement—an understatement so remote that you can't quite guess whether they are joking or just failing to warm up...

...That was the problem that Dewey thought he had solved by believing in Hegel's idealistic metaphysics...

...And to this, nobody in that small farming community, John perhaps least of all, had any practical answer...

...The Encyclopaedia Britannica in its article on Education puts it less succinctly: "By 1900 the center of gravity had shifted from the subject-matter of instruction to the child to be taught...

...It was an answer to that question which still worried him: whether he really meant business when he prayed...

...He joined the church during his sophomore year, and did so with sincere religious feeling, but with no profound experience of conversion...

...So it is just possible that Dewey concealed the dynamite of his educational theories in a pile of dry hay merely to amuse himself...

...An imaginative merchant named Johns Hopkins had just founded a new kind of research university in Baltimore, and Dewey's annunciation angel, Professor Huxley, had delivered the inaugural address...

...But to him, for the time being at least, it was a tranquilizing experience—as blissfully tranquilizing to his mind as the Oil City "conversion" had been to his heart...

...And yet the old moralistic attitude had too much momentum to give way...

...Professors of philosophy were ministers of the gospel who for some reason, located as often in their vocal organs as their brains, had found it easier to teach than preach...

...It would not have been a crisis in your life or mine, but we also did not get a degree from the University of Paris as the most profound expression of American genius...

...He "kept store" in Burlington, a town of ten or twelve thousand, and sold more goods than anybody else in town because of the whimsical way he went at it...

...By the time that year was over, there was very little hope left in the Dewey family that John would turn out to be anything more useful than a philosopher...

...These changes, largely due to the teachings of John Dewey, have become dominant purposes of the American elementary school of the 20th century...

...As it was...

...There was something painfully, or if you will, divinely average in John Dewey's early life and circumstances...

...But when he tried to convey his in words, it came out like this: "What the hell are you worrying about, anyway...

...He found he had a previous engagement at his daughter Evelyn's cattle ranch in the northwest corner of Missouri...

...To be sure, there was no pay attached to this job, but then, on the other hand, he did not have to pay for the privilege of doing it...

...It was a little piece he tossed off after school hours in Charlotte on "The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism...

...And Hegel invented a most ingenious disguise, a truly wondrous scheme for keeping deity in the world, no matter how harsh, fickle, bloody and reckless of ideal interests the world turns out to be when honestly examined...

...Nothing could be farther from an "official" biography, but any remarks I attribute to him were put down immediately in my notebook and are quoted verbatim...

...The whole country was little better in that respect than Burlington, Vermont...

...Unless you understood how exciting it is to fall in love with Hegel—and what hard work—there was very little Dewey could tell you about those three years at Johns Hopkins...

...He earned $40 a month...

...Properly understood the whole world behaves like a mind...

...He wanted to make it hard and sure and solid...

...I just can't stand it again," he told Evelyn...

...He plunged heart and soul into his studies...

...And the solution was, roughly speaking, to subordinate the material sciences, or bring them in under the "human," by asserting that materialness is an illusion...

...Two things made this grade-A brand of fame surprising...

...People were more impressed with his sweet temper and selflessness than his brains...

...Science tells us how things are like each other, and how they follow each other in certain sequences...

...It woke him with a shock, for in reading Huxley's objective explanation of the working of man's body and brain, Dewey felt himself to be in a different world altogether from that in which as a White Street Sunday-school teacher he was telling boys' souls to be good...

...Mrs...

...He hardly offered it as a contribution to the journal...

...It has not appeared elsewhere in history, so far as I know, and is basic to an understanding of this very American philosopher...

...He also started writing a little philosophy on his own...

...He was happy...

...As a temporary solution John went down to Oil City, Pennsylvania, and taught in a high school run by a female cousin...

...He went through grammar and high school fast, but without getting high marks...

...so to speak, waiting in the anteroom while you interview the world—was characteristic of John Dewey...

...I've never had any doubts since then," he added...

...He published 40 books and 815 articles and pamphlets—a pile 12 feet 7 inches high—but if he ever wrote one "quotable"' sentence it got permanently lost in the pile...

...I though something ought to be done...

...I was abnormally bashful...

...That question bothered him a good deal and a long time...

...And not so long ago, Waldo Frank called him "the most influential American...

...I can't recover it...

...The new university was offering $2,500 fellowships to be competed for by college graduates...

...After studying a year, he tried for the fellowship again and got it...

...Charlotte is not far from Burlington, and while teaching everything from the alphabet to plane geometry, Dewey devoted his spare hours, under the direction of his old philosophy professor, H. A. P. Torry, who made a free gift of his time and knowledge, to reading the philosophical classics...

...thesis, "The Quality of Plato," and we discussed it more than once—the last time in 1940...

...On a frequently borrowed wheelbarrow he painted in big red letters: "Stolen from A. S. Dewey...

...To close that chasm always seemed the big problem to John Dewey...

...He was shy too far inside of himself even to think of making love to a girl...

...JOHN DEWEY: MY TEACHER AND FRIEND By Max Eastman This is the first of three installments of a memoir by Max Eastman, a colleague and intimate of John Dewey, the great philosopher and citizen whose centenary is being celebrated this year...

...No flash of wit or poetry illumines it...

...He was born, like Calvin Coolidge, in Vermont, and he was born with the same trick of concealing whatever was, or was not, going on in his head under a noncommittal exterior...

...He slid through his first three college years also without throwing off any sparks, or giving grounds to predict anything about his future except that he was not going to be a mechanic—to convince yourself of which you only had to watch him try to drive a nail...

...He was a good bov, and wanted to be better, and thought God would help him—and that was all...

...In 1879, when John Dewey set out on his life task of reconciling ethics with physiology, there was hardly such a thing as a career in philosophy in America...

...He belonged to the White Street Congregational Church in Burlington...

...He mildly questioned some of the dogmas of the White Street religion...

...Mystic experiences in general, Dewey explained, are purely emotional and cannot be conveyed in words...

...That poised and unexcitable attitude toward God—keeping him...

...But he had rejected the more incredible parts of religion as expounded on White Street, and had ceased to regard what was left as a thing to reason about...

...And it is safe to say that one of the main factors in bringing Dewey down was a flesh-and-blood romance—a romance with a girl who had her feet very firmly planted on the earth...

...he was brought up by an evangelical and "pretty moralistic" mother...

...he said once that he had devoted his entire intellectual life to its solution...

...He did not attend the banquet given in his honor on his 80th birthday, although some of the world's most distinguished citizens were there...

...it was not religion that he felt concerned as a young philosopher to defend...

...Neither can philosophy really, and the philosophers who say so, the skeptics, are the ones who give us a feeling of profound truthfulness...

...The question was: what are you going to do with a 19-year-old philosopher...

...It was not a very dramatic mystic experience...

...He stuttered, too, and that made it seem an especially good joke when he asked for money...

...the man who in order to describe his skeptical attitude toward deity, invented one day, in consultation with his wife, the word "agnostic...

...He found Huxley's world exciting...

...There was no vision, not even a definable emotion—just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries were over...

...Although his religion had so little affirmative content—and had nothing to do, he was sure, with his philosophy—Dewey likened it to the poetic pantheism of Wordsworth, whom he was reading at that time, and to Walt Whitman's sense of oneness with the universe...

...They were a sort of plain-clothes chaplain employed by the colleges to see that science did not run away with the pupils' minds...

...His discovery that the real world is arranged somewhat differently from the plans presented in the White Street Sunday School had upset him pretty badly...

...But Dewey had an aunt with $500, and he borrowed that and went to Johns Hopkins, anyway...

...Louis, Missouri...

...He swam and skated on Lake Champlain, but not any too well...

...HERE THEN is this "most complete expression of American genius" caught fast at the age of 22 in a completely German system of metaphysics...

...So who said there wasn't a career in philosophy in America...

...His parents belonged to the White Street Congregational Church, the father being religious mostly for the reason that it wouldn't have occurred to him not to be, the mother putting a little more feeling into it...

...He wanted to be better, however, with the inward glow of a boy whose sexual life is almost entirely sublimated...

...That sounds obvious now, but in those days it was a revolution...

...A very large part of Western European philosophy is, in fact, an effort to read God back into the universe as fast as science crowds him out...

...Dewey tried for one and failed...

...Dewey had passed his 82nd year when I undertook this engaging task, but there was not a quaver in his voice or a quiver in his handwriting...

...Two brokers living in the same boarding house urged him to borrow some more money and invest it in the town's newest excitement, Standard Oil...

...The whole thing had been done once before when he was 70...