This fallacious line of argument is, in Dewey's opinion, the logical outcome of the a priori and absolutist metaphysics which has prevailed in Europe during the last century, and for which he would substitute the method of intelligent experimentation. He says, "The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural," and he urges as a substitute the promotion of "the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits." When we see the appalling results to which the doctrine of Nationalism has led, we may indeed regard it with Dewey as a logical breakdown, but I fear that actually it has become more powerful, pervading, and firmly fixed than ever through the psychological and economic experiences of the war.[12]
Doctor F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford calls Dewey's "German Philosophy and Politics" "an entirely admirable book; clear, calm, cogent, and popular without being shallow" and he further says:
Professor Dewey was assuredly the ideal person to handle the subject. For though he had made a deep and sympathetic study of German philosophy, he had in the end turned away from it to become a leader in the movement which is most antithetical to the traditionally German type of philosophizing. It must not indeed be alleged that the Anglo-Saxon world has a monopoly of the pragmatic habit of mind; for all men have to act and pragmatism is only the theoretic apprehension of the attitude which imposes itself on every agent everywhere. But it is probably right to regard this habit of mind as characteristically congenial to Anglo-Saxon life, and it was a perception of this that so infuriated our germanized professors who prided themselves on their superiority to the vulgar practicality of the national bent.[13]
A stranger who drops into one of Professor Dewey's classes is at first apt to be puzzled to account for the extent of his influence and the devotion of his disciples. There is nothing in his manner of delivery to indicate that he is saying anything of importance, and it takes some time to realize that he is. He talks along in a casual sort of way with a low and uneventful voice and his eyes mostly directed toward the bare desk or out of the window. Occasionally he wakes up to the fact that the students in the back seats are having difficulty in hearing him, and then he comes down with explosive stress on the next word, a preposition as like as not. His lectures are punctuated by pauses but not in a way to facilitate their comprehension. Sometimes in the midst of a sentence, perhaps between an adjective and its noun, his train of thought will be shunted off on to another line, and the class has to sit patiently at the junction station until it comes back, as it always does eventually. The difficulty of utterance in his lectures, like the tortuous style of his technical writings, results from overconscientiousness. When he misses the right word he does not pick any one at hand and go on but stops talking until he finds the one he wants, and he is so anxious to avoid a misunderstanding that he sometimes fails to insure an understanding. Talking has never become a reflex action with Dewey. He has to think before he speaks. Few professors and almost no instructors are bothered that way.
In profile Professor Dewey looks something like Robert Louis Stevenson, the same long lean face and neck and nose. From the front one would take him to be a Kentucky colonel disguised in spectacles. His long straight black hair, parted in the middle, is now getting gray, but his drooping mustaches, being twenty years younger, are still dark. His eyes are black and keen, and one can catch a twinkle in them if the lids do not drop too quick. His neck-tie is usually awry, and several thousands of orderly schoolma'ams have felt their hands itch to jerk it straight. His drawling careless tone and hesitant manner quite disguise the boldness of his thought and the logical order of its wording. Questions from the class never disconcert him, however inopportune, and the more he is heckled the better he talks.
One of his former students at Columbia, Randolph S. Bourne, gives this pen sketch of Professor Dewey:[14]
Nothing is more symbolic of Professor Dewey's democratic attitude towards life than the disintegrated array of his published writings. Where the neatly uniform works of William James are to be found in every public library, you must hunt long and far for the best things of the man who, since the other's death, is the most significant thinker in America. Pamphlets and reports of obscure educational societies; school journals, university monographs, and philosophical journals, limited to the pedant few; these are the burial-places of much of this intensely alive, futuristic philosophy.... No man, I think, with such universally important things to say on almost every social and intellectual activity of the day, was ever published in forms more ingeniously contrived to thwart the interest of the prospective public.
Professor Dewey's thought is inaccessible because he has always carried his simplicity of manner, his dread of show or self-advertisement, almost to the point of extravagance. In all his psychology there is no place for the psychology of prestige. His democracy seems almost to take that extreme form of refusing to bring one's self or one's ideas to the attention of others. On the college campus or in the lecture-room he seems positively to efface himself. The uncertainty of his silver-gray hair and drooping mustache, of his voice, of his clothes, suggests that he has almost studied the technique of protective coloration. It will do you no good to hear him lecture. His sentences, flowing and exact and lucid when read, you will find strung in long festoons of obscurity between pauses for the awaited right word. The whole business of impressing yourself on other people, of getting yourself over to the people who want to and ought to have you, has simply never come into his ultra-democratic mind.
A prophet dressed in the clothes of a professor of logic, he seems almost to feel shame that he has seen the implications of democracy more clearly than anybody else in the great would-be democratic society about him, and so been forced into the unwelcome task of teaching it.
Knowing that every biographer is expected to show that the subject of his sketch got his peculiar talents by honest inheritance, I wrote to Professor Dewey to inquire what there was in his genealogy to account for his becoming a philosopher. His ancestry is discouraging to those who would find an explanation for all things in heredity.
My ancestry, particularly on my father's side, is free from all blemish. All my forefathers earned an honest living as farmers, wheelwrights, coopers. I was absolutely the first one in seven generations to fall from grace. In the last few years atavism has set in and I have raised enough vegetables and fruit really to pay for my own keep.
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, October 20, 1859, the son of Archibald S. and Lucina A. (Rich) Dewey. His elder brother, Davis Rich Dewey, is professor of economics and statistics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the Special Report on Employees and Wages in the 12th Census as well as of many other works on finance and industry.