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two Healing an “Inward Laceration” Dewey recalled that Hegel’s method healed an “inward laceration” by helping him overcome the “sense of divisions and separations,” inculcated by his evangelical New England upbringing, between mind and body and between nature and spirit that contributed to the growing gulf between philosophy and science .1 Hegel ful¤lled an “inner demand,” Dewey felt, for an “intellectual technique that would be consistent and yet capable of ®exible adaptation to the concrete diversity of experienced things.”2 What Dewey admired most about Hegel was his capacity to maintain silence in the presence of nature. Dewey credited him with the realization that “suppression of belief is the fundamental principle of thinking.”3 Hegel demonstrated the extraordinary power that thought acquires when belief is suspended and the impulse for immediate knowledge is inhibited until the tensions and oppositions of ideas play themselves out in experience. This was wonderful advice about how to philosophize about nature. But Dewey lacked the experience and scienti¤c training possessed by all great naturalists and philosophers, including Hegel, to bring to bear his insights about mind on nature. Darwin, Huxley, and physicists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell excelled as pioneering nineteenth-century scientists because of their incomparable talent in the ¤eld or in the laboratory. While Dewey admired from a distance their scienti¤c rigor and capacity for synthesis, he never had a scienti¤c mentor who stimulated his interest in acquiring expertise in observational and methodological techniques. Although cognizant of his weakness in science, Dewey still felt the alluring pull of philosophy and logic. Dewey could not be more decisive about pursuing his interests in science, he recalled, because he “was controlled largely by a struggle between a native inclination toward the schematic and formally logical, and incidents of personal experience.”4 Nevertheless, this was a crucial period during which Dewey not only thoroughly assimilated Hegelian dialectics but also acquired an astonishingly so- phisticated understanding of ongoing developments in physics. Dewey read Hegel with a critical eye toward bringing his work up to date scienti¤cally by squaring it with the latest theories about force and energy that occupied the minds of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. He also brought a Hegelian perspective to bear on Darwinian evolution in the hopes of advancing a developmental theoretical alternative to natural selection. Johns Hopkins University provided a nearly ideal setting to pursue his converging interests in philosophy and science. the lure of george sylvester morris at johns hopk ins Enrolling in a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1882 did not seem initially to be a particularly auspicious or promising way for Dewey to understand nature through experience. Inaugurated with the intellectual blessings of Huxley, who spoke at the opening ceremonies in 1876, Johns Hopkins under Daniel Gilman’s presidency set out to become a ¤rst-rate university in the sciences. He attracted G. Stanley Hall from Harvard, who immediately established an experimental laboratory in psychology. Although Gilman cared little for philosophy, he did attract the pioneering pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and Hegelian metaphysician George Sylvester Morris. The iconoclastic Peirce had a formidable reputation in logic, but Dewey was disappointed that Peirce focused in his class primarily on mathematical theory. Dewey expressed his disappointment when he con¤ded in Torrey, saying, “By Logic, Mr. Peirce means only an account of the methods of physical sciences, put in mathematical form as far as possible. It’s more of a scienti¤c than philosophical course.”5 Widening his complaint, Dewey added that “Mr. Peirce doesn’t think there is any Philosophy outside the generalizations of physical science.”6 Peirce was never supportive of Dewey’s work and ended up having to compete with Dewey unsuccessfully for an academic appointment at the University of Chicago in 1896. Not surprisingly, Dewey’s estimation of Morris was completely different. Morris had a special gift for putting philosophical ideas in a historical context that Dewey found extremely helpful. Morris showed how presuppositions about knowledge and existence are continually reformulated to yield new solutions to old problems. In Morris’s seminar “The Science of Knowledge,” students were required to trace the intellectual lineage of a disputed issue or theme, showing how the fulcrum of the debate was shifted over time to support different interpretations. Morris’s predilection for idealism was obvious. According to Morris, there were essentially two points of departure in philosophical inquiry: a science of knowing and a science of being. A...

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