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"Rather Gloomy." To many educators and ordinary people, science, which seems to have outstripped the scientists, no longer looks like the right answer. Dewey has no patience with this attitude. He doesn't like the state of the world ("looks to me about the way it does to everybody, I guess—rather gloomy, rather depressing") but he still believes that the habit of intelligent inquiry is the categorical imperative. ("There have been more scientific changes in the last 50 years or so than in centuries. But management of human relations still goes by guesswork. It needs to catch up. People ought to use scientific methods in handling human problems.")
In Problems of Men Dewey is still at war with those who would put classic tradition or theological assumptions above challenge by scientific method. The University of Chicago, where his experiments began, is now one of the places where he sees the classicists enthroned. Writes Dewey: "[We can have] no commerce with the notion that the problems of philosophy are 'eternal. . . .' Eternity that is permitted to become a refuge from the time in which human life goes on may provide a certain kind of consolation. But emotion and comfort should not be identified with understanding and insight. . . . Every class interest in all history has defended itself from examination by putting forth claim to absoluteness. Social fanaticisms, whether of the right or the left, take refuge in the fortresses of principles too absolute to be subject to doubt or inquiry. . . .
"Present-day philosophy cannot desire a better work than to engage in the act of midwifery [of ideas] that was assigned to it by Socrates 2,500 years ago."
* John Dewey is a distant cousin of New York's Governor Tom Dewey, Manila Bay's Admiral George Dewey.