Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology Flashcards
John Dewey · Public domain edition · 239 cards · 64 chapters
John Dewey argues that moral codes have often been built on a degraded view of human nature, and that separating morals from actual human conduct produces a “pathology of goodness.” This deck covers his account of freedom, conduct, and social reform across the book’s key arguments.
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Chapter 1 · Question
How does Dewey explain the origin of morality's hostile view of human nature?
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Chapter 1 · Answer
Dewey argues that morality has largely been concerned with controlling human nature, and because control meets resistance, moralists came to see human nature as evil. He traces this further to the existence of classes: control has been vested in an oligarchy, and aims supplied by parents, priests, and chiefs were foreign to those on whom they were imposed.
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Section 14 cards
How does Dewey explain the origin of morality's hostile view of human nature?
Dewey argues that morality has largely been concerned with controlling human nature, and because control meets resistance, moralists came to see human nature as evil. He traces this further to the existence of classes: control has been vested in an oligarchy, and aims supplied by parents, priests, and chiefs were foreign to those on whom they were imposed.
Chapter 1
What does Dewey say happens to moral principles that exalt themselves by degrading human nature?
Dewey states that moral principles exalting themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide, or else they involve human nature in unending civil war, treating it as a hopeless mess of contradictory forces. Rules can be obeyed and ideals realized only as they appeal to something in human nature and awaken an active response.
Chapter 1
Why does Dewey reject the explanation that theologians alone blackened human nature?
Dewey acknowledges theologians have taken a gloomier view of man than pagans and secularists, and that some writers attribute the blackening to theologians disparaging the human to honor the divine. But he argues this explanation doesn't take us far, since theologians are themselves human and would have had no influence if the human audience had not somehow responded to them.
Chapter 1
According to Dewey, what does it mean that good people have been those who did what they were told?
Dewey argues that good children are those who make as little trouble as possible for their elders, and since most cause annoyance they must be naughty by nature. Generally, good people have been those who did what they were told, and lack of eager compliance is taken as a sign of something wrong in their nature.
Chapter 1
Section 24 cards
What does Dewey say about theories attributing moral rules to deliberate design?
The author argues that any theory attributing the origin of moral rules to deliberate design is false. He distinguishes taking advantage of conditions after they exist from creating them for an advantage. Even though authorities have turned moral rules into an agency of class supremacy, we must go back to the bare fact of social division into superior and inferior, and recognize that accident, not intelligence, produced these social conditions.
Chapter 2
What does Dewey claim about the connection between understanding human nature and managing it?
The author argues that lack of understanding of human nature is the primary cause of disregard for it, and that what cannot be understood cannot be managed intelligently but must be forced into subjection from without. He compares this to early attitudes toward physical nature, where ignorance led to passive submission or magical control, and notes that a decline in oligarchy's authority accompanied rising scientific interest in human nature.
Chapter 2
What is the 'pathology of goodness' Dewey describes when morals are severed from human nature?
The author argues that morals cut off from positive roots in human nature become mainly negative, emphasizing avoidance, escape from evil, and prohibitions. Its commonest form is a neutral respectability and insipidity of character, where absence of social blame marks goodness. Conventional morality is drab: the only fatal thing is to be conspicuous, so people strive to be so much like everybody else that they pass unnoticed.
Chapter 2
How does Dewey characterize the 'executive' type who rejects conventional morality?
The author describes ruder, forceful natures who cannot tame themselves to colorless conformity and see conventional morality as organized futility. Their standard is success and getting things done; being good seems practically synonymous with ineffectuality, and they leave goodness to 'boobs.' They pay tribute to established institutions and denounce defiers, or claim to be agents of a higher morality. Dewey says deliberate hypocrisy is rare, but executive nature plus love of approval produces what critics call hypocrisy.
Chapter 2
Section 34 cards
What does Dewey say the traditional free will debate reflects?
The author argues the traditional discussion of free will reflects a separation of moral activity from nature and the public life of men. Separating morals from human nature drives morals inward into the obscurities and privacies of an inner life, rather than the open air of public life.
Chapter 3
What two schools of social reform does Dewey identify?
One school holds that morality springs from inner freedom within personality, so purifying hearts will change institutions. The other denies any inner power, claiming humans are made by environmental forces and nothing can be done until institutions change. Dewey says both leave the outcome equally hopeless.
Chapter 3
How does Dewey define freedom and conduct?
The author argues all conduct is interaction between elements of human nature and the environment, natural and social. Freedom is found in the kind of interaction that maintains an environment where human desire and choice count for something, making the issue an engineering problem of education and social guidance.
Chapter 3
What does Dewey say a morals based on human nature would achieve?
The author argues such a morals would not automatically solve problems or prevent failure, but would let us state problems so action can be courageously and intelligently directed. It would end the attempt to live in two unrelated worlds, link ethics with physics, biology, history, sociology, law and economics, and make failure a source of instruction.
Chapter 3
Section 43 cards
According to Dewey, what do habits share with physiological functions like breathing?
Dewey argues habits resemble functions such as breathing and digesting in requiring cooperation of organism and environment. Breathing is an affair of air as truly as lungs; walking implicates the ground as well as legs. Habits are thus functions of surroundings as truly as of a person, things done by the environment through organic structures or acquired dispositions.
Chapter 4
Why does Dewey claim conduct is always shared rather than private?
Dewey argues that since habits involve environing conditions and a society or group of fellow-men, conduct is always shared. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share or resist; even letting a man alone is a definite response. He states neutrality is non-existent, so conduct is social whether bad or good, not merely because it ought to be.
Chapter 4
How does Dewey treat the relation of causes to excuses in wrongdoing?
Dewey argues causes for an act always exist, but causes are not excuses. Questions of causation are physical, not moral except when they concern future consequences. Blaming a person's evil will exclusively and condoning offense due to social conditions are equally unreal separations of man from surroundings. Excuses and accusations must be considered as causes of future actions.
Chapter 4
Section 54 cards
What does Dewey say distinguishes the physical from the moral question?
The physical question concerns what has happened and how, and answering it is indispensable to morals, since without it we cannot tell what forces are at work. The moral issue is prospective, concerning the future: modifying the factors that influence future results. Dewey argues that merely pronouncing judgments of merit without regard to their consequences dodges the moral issue.
Chapter 5
According to Dewey, how can we change another person's character or habits?
Dewey argues we cannot change habit directly, calling that notion magic. Instead we change it indirectly by modifying conditions, intelligently selecting and weighting the objects that engage attention and influence the fulfilment of desires. To alter another's will we must alter objective conditions entering into their habits, including our own ways of judging, blaming, praising, and punishing.
Chapter 5
What does Dewey claim is necessary to achieve goals like abolishing war or industrial justice?
Dewey argues that no amount of preaching good will, the golden rule, or cultivating sentiments of love and equity will accomplish such results. There must be change in objective arrangements and institutions; we must work on the environment, not merely on the hearts of men. He compares expecting otherwise to raising flowers in a desert or running motor cars in a jungle.
Chapter 5
Why does Dewey say bad habits are instructive about all habits?
Dewey argues bad habits reveal what technical habits conceal: that all habits are affections with propulsive power and a hold over us. A bad habit overrides formal resolutions and conscious decisions because we are the habit. He concludes all habits are demands for certain kinds of activity, constitute the self, and in any intelligible sense are will, forming desires and ruling thoughts.
Chapter 5
Section 64 cards
According to Dewey, when do tools and bodily organs become actual means?
Dewey argues that nails and boards are merely materials, and saws and hammers are only potential means until employed in actual making. Likewise, eye, arm, and hand are means proper only when in active operation, cooperating with external materials and energies. Without support from beyond themselves, the eye stares blankly and the hand fumbles. Habits are these organizations in which human powers and physical conditions jointly accomplish definite results.
Chapter 6
What does Dewey identify as the essence of magic and hocus-pocus?
Dewey argues the essence of all hocus-pocus is the supposition that results can be accomplished without joint adaptation of human powers and physical conditions. He notes that waving willow branches for rain is natural and innocent, but believing the act has immediate power without cooperation of intermediate natural conditions is magic. Such belief obstructs intelligent study of operative conditions and wastes desire and effort.
Chapter 6
How does Dewey say belief in magic persists in morals and politics?
Dewey argues magic's principle persists whenever results are hoped for without intelligent control of means, or means are supposed to remain inert. In morals and politics, people think feeling strongly or wishing hard enough yields good resolves, peace among nations, or good will in industry, slurring over cooperative objective conditions. Others fancy external machinery like laws alone produces virtue without corresponding functioning of human desires and capacities.
Chapter 6
Why does Dewey say a direct order of will cannot fix bad posture?
Dewey argues a man who cannot stand properly has formed a positive, forceful habit of standing improperly, not merely a negative failure fixable by will. Conditions producing the bad result persist until objective conditions change, just as fire stops only when objective conditions change. Acting on the idea briefly produces only a different kind of bad posture, which the unaccustomed feeling is mistaken for success.
Chapter 6
Section 73 cards
According to Dewey, what is the relationship between sensations and habits?
Dewey argues that distinct sensory qualities are not original elements but products of skilled analysis requiring training and well-formed habits. Even discriminations like black, white, red, and green result from years of active dealings with things. A clear-cut sensation is a sign of training, skill, and habit, not a raw given of experience.
Chapter 7
How does Dewey describe habit's role in filtering perception and thought?
Dewey states that the medium of habit filters all material reaching perception and thought, but the filter is not chemically pure. It is a reagent that adds new qualities and rearranges what is received. Thus ideas and sensations alike depend on experience, which is the operation of habits, originally instincts. Purposes come through the refracting medium of bodily and moral habits.
Chapter 7
Why does Dewey say we must stop thinking of the end to reach it?
Dewey argues the end is merely a series of acts viewed at a remote stage, and means are the same series viewed earlier. To reach an end involving change, we must take our mind off it and attend to the next act, making that the end. Otherwise an established habit simply repeats the old action regardless of conscious command.
Chapter 7
Section 84 cards
How does Dewey define the relationship between means and ends?
Dewey argues that means and ends are two names for the same reality, denoting not a division in reality but a distinction in judgment. An end is a series of acts taken collectively, like an army; a means is that same series taken distributively, like this soldier or that officer. To conceive an end is to enlarge our view of the act to be performed.
Chapter 8
Why does Dewey say habits are never truly latent or inoperative?
Dewey argues that inactivity holds only of overt, visibly obvious operation. In actuality each habit operates all the time of waking life, though its operation becomes the dominant characteristic trait of an act only occasionally. The habit of walking is expressed in what a man sees when he keeps still, even in dreams, since locomotion is potential energy that must be accounted for.
Chapter 8
What is character, according to Dewey, and how does it relate to habits?
Dewey argues that character is the interpenetration of habits. If each habit existed in an insulated compartment without affecting others, character would not exist and conduct would be only a juxtaposition of disconnected reactions. Since environments overlap and situations contain like elements, continuous modification of habits by one another goes on, so character can be read through individual acts.
Chapter 8
When does an act come under moral scrutiny, and what error does Dewey warn against?
Dewey argues acts are usually treated as technical, recreational, or economic rather than moral, and that lugging in morals at every point cultivates moral valetudinarianism. Yet any act, even a trivial one, may entail consequences for habit and character requiring judgment. The fatal error is solidifying this pragmatic distinction into a fixed, absolute division between moral and non-moral acts.
Chapter 8
Section 93 cards
What common mistake do the two opposing moral theories share, according to Dewey?
Dewey says one theory holds only will and motive count morally while acts are external and accidental; the other holds this cultivates mere feeling and ignores consequences. Like most opposite philosophic extremes, both make a common mistake: they ignore the projective force of habit and the implication of habits in one another, thereby splitting a unified deed into a disjoined inner motive and outer act.
Chapter 9
How does common-sense understand will, and how does Dewey illustrate it with Kant?
Common-sense takes will as something practical and moving: the body of active habits and dispositions that makes a man do what he does, a cause of consequences rather than something severed from them. Dewey notes that even Kant, who excluded consequences from moral value, held that a society of men of good will would in fact maintain social peace, freedom and cooperation.
Chapter 9
Why does Dewey say deeds cannot be judged without disposition, and what does he propose for criminal law?
Dewey argues disposition must be considered not because it is isolated from consequences but because consequences must be viewed broadly: disposition is habitual and persistent, showing itself in many acts, so only a running account disentangles its tendency from accidents. He says legal procedure wobbles between too tender and too drastic treatment of crime, and scientific criminal law will dawn when each case gets a clinical record like a physician's.
Chapter 9
Section 102 cards
How does Dewey criticize utilitarianism's treatment of consequences?
Dewey argues utilitarians reject mere tendency and demand a mathematical equation of act and consequence. They therefore slight the steady, controllable factor of disposition and fix on pleasures and pains, which are most subject to incalculable accident. This is a hopeless enterprise of judging acts apart from character, and Dewey calls it a fiction of self-conceit.
Chapter 10
What does Dewey mean by saying 'principle' is a eulogistic cover for tendency?
Dewey explains that acting on 'principle' rather than expediency contains a truth: it is unsafe to judge an act by probable consequences in an isolated case. But 'principle' merely dresses up the fact of tendency—habits have causal efficacy, yet their outworking is subject to contingencies. In doubt, we stick to probable long-run effect, or else we hunt exceptions favoring immediate desire.
Chapter 10
Section 114 cards
According to Dewey, why are morals primarily objective?
The author argues morals are primarily objective because will, concretely, means habits, and habits incorporate an environment within themselves. Habits are adjustments of the environment, not merely to it. Since the environment is many rather than one, will and disposition are plural, implying the possibility of conflict, which is realized in fact.
Chapter 11
When does morality legitimately become subjective or personal, per Dewey?
The author argues morality becomes legitimately subjective when activities that once included objective factors temporarily lose support from objects, yet strive to change conditions until lost support is regained. He compares this to a man who, remembering prior satisfaction of thirst, digs a well: water exists in imagination, not fact, during the transitional stage.
Chapter 11
How does Dewey criticize Plato's view of ideal objects?
The author argues Plato preserves an intimation of the natural function of ideal objects by insisting they are patterns for reorganizing the actual scene. But Dewey says the pity is Plato could not see that patterns exist only within and for the sake of reorganization, so they, not empirical objects, are the instrumental affairs. Not seeing this, Plato converted a function of reorganization into metaphysical reality.
Chapter 11
What does Dewey say ideals like justice and peace can be known by?
The author argues ideals of justice, peace, human brotherhood, equality, and order are not self-enclosed things known by introspection, as objects were once supposedly known by rational insight. Like thunderbolts, tubercular disease, and the rainbow, they can be known only by extensive and minute observation of consequences incurred in action.
Chapter 11
Section 124 cards
According to the chapter, why do customs persist more than individuals create them?
The author argues the common supposition that institutions are formed by consolidating individual habits is mostly false. To a larger extent customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. An individual acquires morality as he inherits the speech of his group; the group's activities are already there, and assimilating his acts to their pattern is a prerequisite of sharing in them.
Chapter 12
How does the chapter describe the nature of habit?
The author states the nature of habit is to be assertive, insistent, and self-perpetuating. Infants are subject from birth to the attentions and demands of others who are beings with habits, and who esteem the habits they have, if for no other reason than that having them limits their imagination. This explains why a child learns the language those around him speak.
Chapter 12
What does the author say collective mind actually means?
The author argues it is difficult to see that collective mind means anything more than a custom brought at some point to explicit, emphatic consciousness, emotional or intellectual. The mysterious air of group-minds, national-minds, and crowd-minds disappears once custom's priority to habit formation is recognized, rather than treating mind as preceding action.
Chapter 12
How does the chapter distinguish crowd psychology from democracy and explain mobs?
The author argues Le Bon's assimilation of democracy to crowd psychology shows lack of psychological insight. Democracy exhibits thought submerged in habit, as in any institution; the crowd and mob submerge thought in undefined emotion. Mobs express a disintegration of habits releasing impulse, and leaders may deliberately use fear and suspicion to break through custom and create mob psychology.
Chapter 12
Section 134 cards
What does Dewey say is the proper problem of social psychology?
The author argues social psychology should not ask how individual or collective minds form social groups and customs. Instead, it should study how different customs and established interacting arrangements form and nurture different minds. The primary facts of social psychology center on collective habit and custom, with psychology serving as an indispensable tool for understanding politics, law, religion, and economics.
Chapter 13
How does Dewey define true docility in the young?
The author argues true docility is the ability to learn whatever the world has to teach and an eagerness to learn all the lessons of active, inquiring, expanding experience. Current customs pervert this into conformity, constriction, and surrender of skepticism and experiment. Adults, tempted by the plasticity of the young, treat them as putty to mold, making education the art of exploiting helplessness to maintain custom.
Chapter 13
According to Dewey, what makes a habit bad?
The author argues what makes a habit bad is enslavement to old ruts, not membership in a conventionally enumerated list of 'bad' habits. Habit is an ability or art formed through past experience; whether it is conservative or progressive depends on its quality. Genuine reasonableness lies in effective mastery of conditions now entering into action, not in repeating paths that led to good under other conditions.
Chapter 13
What does Dewey claim about democracy's actual effect on originality?
The author argues that in theory democracy should stimulate original thought and evoke action adjusted to cope with new forces. In fact, he claims it is still so immature that its main effect is to multiply occasions for imitation. Progress is more rapid than in other social forms only by accident, since diverse conflicting models give individuality a chance amid the resulting chaos of opinions.
Chapter 13
Section 144 cards
What does Dewey say happens to thought separated from habit?
The author argues that thought excluded from ordinary habits lacks means of execution and, lacking application, also lacks test and criterion. It is therefore condemned to a separate realm; trying to act on it produces clumsy, forced action, and contrary habits betray the purpose. Such thought either turns to specialized technical matters or becomes sentimentalized.
Chapter 14
How does Dewey describe the 'practical' men who combine thought and habit?
The author argues these effectual practical men direct thought toward their own advantage, with habits to match, and so dominate the actual situation. They encourage routine in others, subsidize remote learning as 'the ideal,' praise subjection as loyalty and law-and-order, and denounce independent thought in others as subversive while thinking for themselves.
Chapter 14
What does Dewey say about mechanization in habit?
The author argues all habit involves mechanization: a physiologically engrained mechanism operating spontaneously when cued, and habit is impossible without it. But mechanization is not necessarily all there is to habit. He contrasts the artist, a masterful technician whose technique is fused with thought and feeling, with the mechanical performer who lets the mechanism dictate the performance.
Chapter 14
What distinction does Dewey draw between the artist and the mere technician?
The author argues both exhibit habit, but of two kinds: intelligent and routine. The artist is a masterful technician whose technique is fused with thought and feeling; the mechanical performer lets the mechanism dictate the performance. Dewey rejects the idea that skill is built by soulless repetition later magically taken over by imagination, noting the artist uses an art already possessed.
Chapter 14
Section 154 cards
Why does Dewey say separating habit from thought serves a social purpose?
The author argues that those seeking a monopoly of social power benefit from the dualism of habit and thought, action and soul: it lets them do the thinking and planning while others remain docile instruments of execution. Until this scheme changes, democracy is bound to be perverted in realization.
Chapter 15
How does Dewey criticize Bergson's élan vital?
Dewey credits Bergson with detecting that the mind-body dualism reflects the social divorce of habit from thought, but deplores that Bergson recommends and tries to establish the division as necessary. Dewey argues a blind creative force is as likely to be destructive as creative, and that the eulogistic qualities Bergson attributes to élan vital come from romantic optimism, not its nature.
Chapter 15
What are customs, for practical purposes, according to Dewey?
For practical purposes morals mean customs, folkways, established collective habits. Dewey says this is a commonplace of anthropologists, though moral theorists imagine their own place and day is an exception. Customs always supply standards for personal activities, forming the pattern individual activity must weave into. Today's mobility offers many custom-patterns, letting individuals intelligently adapt and remake customs.
Chapter 15
What is the real opposition Dewey identifies, against Sumner?
Dewey says recognizing custom's place in civilized society is not a denial of rationality, as Sumner fancies. The real opposition is not between reason and habit but between routine unintelligent habit and intelligent habit or art. Even a savage custom may be reasonable in adapting to social needs; experience can add conscious recognition, adding the custom of rationality to a prior custom.
Chapter 15
Section 163 cards
Why did Socrates begin conscious moral theorizing, according to Dewey?
Dewey credits Socrates with the discovery that current customs contradict one another, that many are unjust, and that without criticism none is fit to guide life. This initiated conscious moral theorizing. Dewey argues Plato then solved the problem of how personal thought reaches objective standards by making reason itself cosmic and universal, which merely substituted metaphysical ethics for the ethics of custom.
Chapter 16
How does Dewey use language to answer the charge that custom-derived morals lack authority?
The objection says deriving standards from custom makes morals secondary to bare fact. Dewey calls this a false separation and compares morals to language: language grew from unintelligent babblings and gestures, yet once produced it operates as language, modifying and redirecting the forces that made it, generating grammar, literature, and education. He argues every institution similarly brings demands, rules, and standards that are additional forces, not idle decorations.
Chapter 16
What authority do standards originating in custom have, in Dewey's empirical answer?
Dewey concedes the question is unanswerable in one sense—but equally unanswerable for any origin, including transcendental ideals. Empirically, the authority is that of life: asking why employ language or science is like asking why live. Since one must engage in life somehow, the real question is how we use and are used by these things, not whether. The choice is between more or less intelligent customs.
Chapter 16
Section 174 cards
Why does Dewey say the psychology of habit is objective and social?
Dewey argues settled action must adjust to environing conditions and incorporate them; for humans the important conditions are formed by other people's activities. Infancy, in which each person begins completely dependent on others, makes this fundamental. Therefore what is distinctively individual in behavior and mind is not an original datum, contrary to traditional theory, though physiological individuality colors habitual activity.
Chapter 17
What does Dewey claim the traditional psychology of a separate mind reflects?
Dewey argues it is a reflex of conditions cutting human nature off from natural objective relations: first man from nature, then each man from his fellows. Isolation from nature shows in the mind-body split. He says this psychology began as a formulation of morality treating important action as a private concern, and its exaggeration of individuality is largely a compensatory reaction against institutional rigidities.
Chapter 17
How does Dewey criticize psycho-analysis while crediting it?
Dewey says clinical psychology's revolt against orthodox psychology has ethical import, insisting on unconscious forces determining conduct, desire, judgment and belief. But he argues the psycho-analytic founders retain the notion of a separate psychic realm, effectively talking about unconscious consciousness. Their truths get mixed with the false psychology of original individual consciousness, producing artificial explanations, as with social psychology's collective mind.
Chapter 17
According to Dewey, what is individual mind and how does individuality begin?
Dewey says conflict of habits releases impulsive activities requiring modification of habit, custom and convention. The individualized quality of habitual activity is abstracted and becomes a center of activity aiming to reconstruct customs per a desire rejected by the immediate situation, felt as one's own in temporary opposition to environment. Impulse deliberately asserted against existing custom begins individuality in mind.
Chapter 17
Section 184 cards
According to Dewey, what gives native human impulses their meaning?
Dewey argues that the meaning of native activities is not native but acquired. It depends on interaction with a matured social medium. Native reactions to stimuli become significant only through the responsive behavior of others, who convert a blind physical discharge into a meaningful anger, such as sullenness or indignation. These displays are habits formed under the influence of association, not pure impulses.
Chapter 18
Why does Dewey reject explaining social diversity by native instincts?
Dewey argues that the native stock of instincts is practically the same everywhere, while custom and culture differ enormously. Since such diversity cannot be attributed to an original identity, the development of native impulse must be stated in terms of acquired habits, not the growth of customs in terms of instincts. He cites examples like human sacrifice in Peru versus the tenderness of St. Francis.
Chapter 18
What role does Dewey assign to original, unlearned activity in conduct?
Dewey holds that original, unlearned activity has an important distinctive place. Impulses are the pivots upon which reorganization of activities turns; they are agencies of deviation, giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality. So whenever we study social transition, flux, or projects for reform, our study must analyze native tendencies. Interest in progress and reform explains the scientific interest in primitive human nature.
Chapter 18
Why does Dewey link interest in instincts to interest in reform?
Dewey argues that interest in progress and reform is the reason for the great scientific interest in primitive human nature. He says men were long blind to powerful instincts because they lacked a conception of orderly progress. This obtuseness to facts reflected a lack of interest in what could be done with impulses, due to lack of interest in modifying existing institutions. Interest in savages and babies arose with interest in abolishing old institutions.
Chapter 18
Section 194 cards
According to the chapter, what does the outcome of an impulse like fear depend on?
The chapter states that any impulse may become organized into almost any disposition according to how it interacts with surroundings. Fear may become cowardice, caution, reverence, or scepticism. The actual outcome depends on how the impulse of fear is interwoven with other impulses, which in turn depends on the outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social environment.
Chapter 19
How does the chapter distinguish education from training?
The author argues that truly humane education consists in intelligent direction of native activities in light of the possibilities and necessities of the social situation. But for the most part, adults have given training rather than education: an impatient, premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits. Love of power, timidity before the novel, and self-admiring complacency have blocked immature impulse from exercising its reorganizing potentialities.
Chapter 19
What does the chapter say docility has wrongly been identified with?
The chapter says docility has been identified with imitativeness instead of with power to re-make old habits and re-create. Plasticity and originality have been opposed to each other, ignoring that the most precious part of plasticity is the ability to form habits of independent judgment and inventive initiation. The author argues it demands more intense docility to form flexible, easily re-adjusted habits than to acquire those that rigidly copy others' ways.
Chapter 19
What does the chapter say about 'infantalisms' and where they are deepest?
The chapter states that early in life sets of mind are formed without attentive thought, and these persist and control the mature mind. Adults instill 'moral' habits with maximum emotional hold and minimum understanding. These habitudes, deeply engrained before thought is awake, are usually deepest and most unget-at-able where critical thought is most needed: in morals, religion and politics. They account for many irrationalities among otherwise rational people.
Chapter 19
Section 204 cards
What role does Dewey assign to impulse in adult life beyond childhood?
Dewey argues impulse never wholly ceases its refreshing role in adult life; if it did, life would petrify and society stagnate. Instinctive reactions, ordinarily tamed to obey custom, are released in extraordinary crises and show by wild energy how superficial routine's control is. He cites the saying that civilization is only skin deep, with a savage persisting beneath the civilized man's clothes.
Chapter 20
How does Dewey say nations differ from persons regarding aging and death?
Dewey argues the analogy between a person and a nation regarding senescence and death is defective. A nation is always renewed by the death of old constituents and birth of fresh ones; not the nation but its customs get old, petrifying into rigidity—social arterial sclerosis. He notes the stock of fresh peoples is approaching exhaustion, so civilization must be rejuvenated from within rather than relying on that expensive method.
Chapter 20
Why does Dewey claim rigid moral codes turn out loose and slack?
Dewey argues rigid moral codes attempting definite injunctions for every occasion turn out loose and slack. No elaboration of statute law can forestall variant cases and the need for ad hoc interpretation; schemes compensating for explicit strictness in some lines with implicit looseness in others. The only truly severe code foregoes codification, throwing responsibility for judging each case upon the agents, imposing the burden of discovery and adaptation.
Chapter 20
How does Dewey reconcile the popular and anthropological views of savage life?
Dewey says the truth combines both views: where customs exist among savages they are one pattern and bind personal sentiment and thought to a degree unknown in civilized life, but since custom cannot cover all daily detail, whatever is left uncovered is free from regulation and left to appetite and momentary circumstance. Thus enslavement to custom and license of impulse exist side by side, each intensifying the other—a pattern Dewey says recurs within civilization when customs harden.
Chapter 20
Section 214 cards
How do reformer and conservative each misuse habit and instinct psychology?
The author argues both sides rest on the wrong factor. Radical reformers, following Locke and Helvetius, stress habit and institutions to claim human nature is wholly malleable and infinitely perfectible. Conservatives cite native instincts to claim human nature is unalterable. The author argues the reverse: custom has the greatest inertia, while instincts are most readily modifiable through educative direction.
Chapter 21
Why does the author say actual social change is never as great as apparent change?
Political and legal institutions may be altered or abolished, but the habits of thought and feeling shaped to their pattern persist and insensibly assimilate outer innovations, much as American judges nullify statutes by interpreting them through common law. Habits of thought outlive changes in overt action. Real moral effects of revolutions appear only after a new generation's habits of mind form under the new conditions.
Chapter 21
What error does the author attribute to those who call reform impossible because human nature is fixed?
The author argues they attribute to native activities the permanence and inertia that belong only to acquired customs. Aristotle treated slavery as rooted in aboriginal nature, yet slavery is a social state, not a psychological necessity. Likewise war and the existing economic regime are social patterns woven from instinctive activities: native nature supplies raw material, but custom furnishes the machinery and designs.
Chapter 21
How does the author use basket weaving to explain war and the economic regime?
Native tendencies such as anger, pugnacity, rivalry, and self-display make war possible and cannot be eradicated, just as society cannot go on without eating or union of the sexes. But to fancy they must eventuate in war is like a savage believing his tribe's basket patterns are natural necessities because the fibers have fixed properties. Custom supplies the designs.
Chapter 21
Section 224 cards
What does Dewey claim about the origin of pugnacity and fear compared to pity and sympathy?
The author argues that pugnacity and fear are no more native than pity and sympathy. The important moral question is how these native tendencies interact, since their interaction may produce a chemical transformation rather than a mechanical combination. He uses this to reject the idea that any single force produces a social institution.
Chapter 22
How does Dewey criticize explaining social institutions by single forces?
The author argues that no social institution is the product of one dominant force; it is a function of many social factors in mutual inhibition and reinforcement. Explaining war by pugnacity or capitalism by gain is infantile logic that reduplicates a unity of result as a unity of force, producing a mythological political zoology that works havoc with intelligence.
Chapter 22
What does Dewey say makes up the warlike force, and what does that imply?
The author argues that many impulses—pugnacity, rivalry, vainglory, love of booty, fear, suspicion, anger, love of power, courage, loyalty, affection, piety—make up the warlike force. Assuming one unchanging native force generates war is as naive as assuming the enemy is moved only by meaner tendencies and we only by nobler ones.
Chapter 22
What does Dewey conclude about war and social equivalents after the world war?
The author argues war is a function of social institutions, not of fixed human constitution, so the immutability argument for war fails. He says the last great war made finding equivalents harder, and it is naive to think war-impulses can be sublimated in a side-line; heroic emotions must find outlets in all tasks of peace, requiring general social reorganization.
Chapter 22
Section 234 cards
What does Dewey say about the argument that economic exploitation flows from immutable human nature?
The author argues this claim is used to defend existing economic institutions, including private property and profit incentives, as rooted in an original proprietary instinct. He does not deny a possessive tendency exists, but argues its means of realization are highly versatile, so treating the present system of stocks, bonds, wills, and inheritance as its sole legitimate expression requires arrogant ignorance.
Chapter 23
How does Dewey use the phrase 'I own, therefore I am'?
He offers it as a truer psychology than Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am,' arguing the self gets solidity and form through appropriating things identified with the 'me.' He even claims a workman gets to have 'his' machine and is perturbed at a change. Deeds are imputed to a man as their owner, not merely creator, which is the root of moral and legal responsibility.
Chapter 23
What does Dewey say about the concept of 'motive' and incentive?
The author argues the whole concept of motives is extra-psychological, an outcome of attempts to influence human action. A motive does not exist prior to an act and produce it; it is an act plus a judgment upon some element of it, made in light of consequences. He calls it absurd to ask what induces a man to activity generally, since man is an active being.
Chapter 23
How does Dewey challenge the idea that man is naturally inert and needs external reward to act?
The author argues it is false that a man requires a motive to make him do something, calling the opposing assumption monstrous. He says man acts anyway and can't help acting; to a healthy man inaction is the greatest woe. He notes children show laziness is an acquired vice or virtue, and that hunger names an active process, not a motive to act.
Chapter 23
Section 244 cards
According to Dewey, what is a motive?
Dewey argues a motive is simply an impulse viewed as a constituent in a habit, a factor in a disposition. It arises when an inchoate activity is taken in forward-looking reference to results, especially approbation and condemnation. He rejects the idea that a man needs a motive to be induced to act; rather, when going to act he needs to know what he is going to do and its consequences.
Chapter 24
Why does economic psychology recognize only personal gain as a motive?
Dewey argues part of the answer is the tendency in all sciences toward artificial conceptual simplifications. But the significant part concerns social conditions under which work is done, which put unnatural emphasis on the prospect of reward. Social institutions and expectations shape and crystallize impulses into dominant habits, rather than customs being direct consequences of specific impulses.
Chapter 24
Why is productive work treated as burdensome 'labor'?
Dewey argues the social conditions under which labor is undertaken have become so uncongenial to human nature that it is not undertaken for intrinsic meaning; it is immediately irksome. The alleged need for an incentive is really a need to overcome contrary stimuli from social conditions. This is a fact about existing industrial conditions, not about native original activity, since activity is naturally agreeable.
Chapter 24
What does Dewey say explains the persistence of war and the economic regime?
Dewey argues the trouble lies in the inertness of established habit, not in unalterable human nature as conservatives claim. Habits, however accidental their origin, persist until the environment obstinately rejects them, and they stimulate, inhibit, and organize native impulses into their own likeness. He concludes man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.
Chapter 24
Section 254 cards
What does Dewey say the existing economic system has bred in industrial workers?
The author argues the economic system has bred a psychology that is slack and irresponsible, combining maximum mechanical routine with maximum explosive, unregulated impulsiveness. These traits are formidable obstacles to social change. He rejects blaming inherent selfishness or relying on moral and religious revival, saying the evils point to the need for changed economic institutions.
Chapter 25
Why does Dewey say educating the young is the chief means of social improvement?
The author argues the young are not yet subject to the full impact of established customs; their impulsive activity is vivid, flexible, experimenting, and curious, while adults' habits are comparatively fixed. He claims universal education is still more idea than fact and has largely served nationalistic and economic regimes, yet it remains the least expensive and most orderly route to social rectification.
Chapter 25
What does Dewey say is necessary for education to improve society?
It is not necessary for adults to hold a formulated definite ideal of a better state; an educational enterprise conducted in that spirit would probably just substitute one rigidity for another. What is necessary is that habits be formed which are more intelligent, sensitively percipient, informed with foresight, aware, direct, sincere, and flexibly responsive than current ones, so people meet their own problems and propose their own improvements.
Chapter 25
How does Dewey respond to calls for restoring fixed habits and immutable standards?
The author argues the remedy is futile and not even desirable, since the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief cause of their decay and disintegration. A laxity due to decadence of old habits cannot be corrected by exhortations to restore former rigidity. He calls plaintive lamentations about change and appeals for restoration of senile authority signs of personal feebleness, a 'defense reaction.'
Chapter 25
Section 264 cards
What fallacy does Dewey identify in scientific specialism's use of classifications?
The author argues the fallacy is forgetting the office of distinctions and classifications and treating them as marking things in themselves. This false abstractionism, once common in physical science, now governs theorizing about human nature, where man is resolved into a numbered, catalogued collection of primary instincts. Dewey insists such lists are only classifications for a purpose, not things in themselves.
Chapter 26
How does Dewey explain Hobbes's emphasis on fear?
Dewey argues Hobbes placed an excessive causal load on fear because his social situation conduced to fearfulness: disorders bred general distrust, antagonism, brutal swashbuckling and disintegrating intrigue. As an account of the psychology of the natural man, Hobbes's theory is unsound; but as a report of contemporary social conditions, there is much to be said for it.
Chapter 26
What does Dewey say about Plato's threefold division of the soul?
Dewey calls Plato's division into rational, spirited-active, and appetitive elements immensely illuminating. Plato said society is the human soul writ large, finding three classes: philosophic-scientific, soldier-citizenry, and traders-artisans. Dewey argues the distinctions were not projected from the natural individual into society but cultivated in classes of individuals by force of social custom and expectation.
Chapter 26
What is the fallacy in the self-preservation instinct argument?
Dewey says acts that spring from life also in the main conserve life, which is merely the truism that life is life, a continuing activity. The self-love school converted this fact into a separate special force behind life. Because an animal cannot live except as it is alive, it is concluded all acts are instigated by an impulse to self-preservation; a result is treated as an actuating cause.
Chapter 26
Section 274 cards
What fallacy does Dewey identify about acting as a self?
The fallacy is transforming the truistic fact of acting as a self into the fiction of acting always for self. Dewey argues that because a Nero and a Peabody both get satisfaction, theorists wrongly infer their satisfactions are the same in quality and both were actuated by love of the same objective. In reality, the more we dwell on the common fact of fulfilment, the more we realize the difference in kinds of selves fulfilled.
Chapter 27
What belief did Dewey say fostered the fallacy of self-love?
Dewey says the material error was belief in the fixity and simplicity of the self, fostered by theologians with their dogma of the unity and ready-made completeness of the soul. He argues we reach true conceptions of motivation only by recognizing that selfhood is in process of making, and that any self can include inconsistent, unharmonized dispositions. Inconsistencies and shiftings in character are the commonest things in experience.
Chapter 27
How does Dewey distinguish pity, sacrifice, confidence, and control from their self-prefixed forms?
Dewey argues the word self infects these words with fixed introversion and isolation, implying the act turns back on an already fully existing self. Pity directed outward creates a self; self-pity withdraws the mind and blocks learning. Sacrifice enlarges a self; self-sacrifice is self-maiming asking compensatory pay. Confidence is directness in meeting facts; self-confidence is smug complacency. Control enlarges the self; self-control contracts it, a self-conscious moral athleticism.
Chapter 27
What does Dewey say about the will to power?
Dewey argues the will to power is initially hardly more than a name for a quality of all activity: every fulfilled activity terminates in added control of conditions, and each impulse or habit is a will to its own power. This is not a demand for power but a search for opportunity to use power already existing. When frustration dams activity and social conditions make subjugating others the path of least resistance, the will to power bursts into flower.
Chapter 27
Section 283 cards
Why does Dewey call the creative/acquisitive instinct division convenient but mistaken?
The author argues the division is convenient because it sums up facts of the present economic system, but mistaken because it takes social products for psychological originals. Native activity is both creative and acquisitive: creative as a process, acquisitive in that it usually terminates in some tangible product that brings the process to consciousness of itself.
Chapter 28
What twofold answer does Dewey give for why process is subservient to product in modern industry?
The author argues that much economic work is done with machines not under the operator's personal control, operated for ends the worker has no share in forming and no interest in apart from wages; means are cut off from ends. Second, what remains to the workman is love of security and a wish for a good time rather than acquisitive desire.
Chapter 28
Why does Dewey say acquisitiveness plays a small role even for wealthy men?
The author argues acquisition is necessary as an outcome but arises not from love of accumulation; without a large stock of possessions one cannot engage effectively in modern business. It is an incident of love of power, desire to impress, obtain prestige, secure influence, and manifest ability. He adds that not acquiring dollars but chasing them is the important thing.
Chapter 28
Section 294 cards
Why does Dewey reject a fixed dualism between acquisitive and creative impulses?
The author argues the dualism wrongly assumes a complete split of higher and lower in original human nature, leaving no organic remedy and only sentimental exhortation. Instead there are indefinite original activities organized into interests by situations, so increasing creative and humane quality means modifying the social conditions that stimulate, select, and coordinate native activities.
Chapter 29
What does Dewey say industry absorbs, and what motives does he attribute to industrial leaders?
Dewey denies it can be denied that captains of industry are creative artists of a sort and that industry absorbs an undue share of present creative activity. To impute simply an acquisitive motive lacks insight into their conduct and loses the clew to bettering conditions. Leaders combine far-reaching planning, technical skill, control over natural forces, love of adventure, excitement, and mastery of fellow-men.
Chapter 29
What analogy does Dewey use against independent, one-to-one original instincts?
Dewey compares instincts like fear, anger, and envy to suction, rusting, thunder, and lighter-than-air machines: they are realities, but science advanced only when it abandoned special forces like nature's abhorrence of a vacuum or a force of combustion. Such 'forces' merely restated phenomena in verbal, generalized form, converting a problem into a simulated solution.
Chapter 29
What two fallacies does Dewey identify in treating hunger or sex as a single separate tendency?
First, no activity is confined to its most flagrant channel; the whole organism is involved, and since total organic states never repeat, hunger and sex phenomena are never twice the same. Second, the environment is never twice alike, so acts have different consequences, which are the only components of the act's meaning.
Chapter 29
Section 304 cards
According to Dewey, what causes most so-called self-deception?
Dewey argues that most so-called self-deception arises from using immediate organic states—feeling good or gaining direct satisfaction—as the criterion of an act's value. Such a judgment may differ entirely from the judgment others make based on the act's objective or social consequences. Even a child sees the smash caused by anger, and that smash may compete with the satisfied feeling of discharged energy as an index of value.
Chapter 30
Why does Dewey reject the notion that anger is a single force?
Dewey calls the idea that anger remains a single force a lazy mythology. The felt quality of a child's anger depends first on his organism's condition, which is never twice alike, and second on the environment it impinges upon. Anger at stronger playmates who avenge themselves differs from anger at weaker children yielding victory and power. Even hunger and sex vary with social context; only when a man is starving is hunger an unqualified natural impulse.
Chapter 30
How does Dewey criticize psycho-analysts' treatment of sex?
Dewey argues psycho-analysts flagrantly exhibit artificial simplification and turn social results into psychic causes. Usually male writers treat the psychology of woman as a Platonic universal while treating men as individuals varying with structure and environment. They treat symptoms of present Western civilization as necessary effects of fixed native impulses. Romantic love today is as much a sign of specific historic conditions as battleships and combustion engines; Dewey says a Marxian simplification is nearer the truth than Jung's Libido.
Chapter 30
What three possibilities does Dewey identify in the career of an impulse?
Dewey states that a released impulse activity has three general possibilities. It may find a surging, explosive discharge—blind and unintelligent. It may be sublimated, becoming a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a continuing course of action, as anger may become conviction of social injustice to be remedied, or sexual attraction may reappear in art or domestic attachments. Or it may be suppressed, neither expressed in spasmodic action nor employed in an enduring interest.
Chapter 30
Section 314 cards
What happens to suppressed psychic energy, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues suppression is not annihilation: psychic energy cannot be abolished like physical energy. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it turns inward and leads a surreptitious, subterranean life. A suppressed activity, he says, causes intellectual and moral pathology, and isolated or spasmodic outbursts signal immaturity, crudity, and savagery.
Chapter 31
What two opposite classes does Dewey say resort to artificial stimulation?
Dewey identifies two opposite forms. One is people in routine, monotonous toil marked by fatigue and hardship, who lack opportunity for imagination. The other is intellectual and executive people whose activities are narrowed by over-specialization; they think too much along one line and carry unshared responsibilities, seeking escape into a sociable, easy-going world.
Chapter 31
Why does Dewey say the optimistic natural-harmony view of recreation is mistaken?
Dewey describes an optimistic theory holding that natural law implies natural harmony, so balancing useful work with the environment yields happiness and rest. He argues this view aligns with Puritan devotion to work for its own sake and breeds distrust of play. He contends that even under the best social conditions there is enough maladjustment that constraint and fatigue always accompany activity, so re-creation is needed.
Chapter 31
What moral function does Dewey assign to play and fine art?
Dewey argues play and make-believe art are moral necessities, not merely innocent diversions. They care for the margin between the total stock of impulses demanding outlet and the amount spent in regular action, keeping a balance work cannot maintain. They add variety, flexibility, and sensitiveness to disposition. He notes their humanizing capacities in sport, drama, fiction, music, poetry, and newspapers have largely been neglected.
Chapter 31
Section 324 cards
According to Dewey, what is the moral function of art and play?
The author argues art and play are morally necessary because they release impulses differently from ordinary activity, forestalling exaggerations and deficits and preventing a stereotyping of attention. They soften rigidities, relax strains, allay bitterness, dispel moroseness, and break down narrowness from specialized tasks. Depriving them of careless rapture destroys this moral function.
Chapter 32
How does Dewey distinguish creative art from futile romancing?
Both arise when impulse is impeded and imagination exceeds fact. In art, converted energy starts an activity that shapes material, and fancy is fed on life's stuff, yielding rejuvenated, composed form. In futile romancing, fancy remains an end in itself, producing withdrawal from realities while impotent wishes build a world of temporary excitement.
Chapter 32
What does Dewey say is the real evil of checking impulses?
The author argues the evil is not that impulses are checked; without inhibition there is no instigation of imagination or redirection into more comprehensive activities. The evil lies in refusing direct attention, which forces the impulse into disguise and concealment, where it enacts an unavowed private life subject to no inspection or control.
Chapter 32
How does Dewey criticize clinical psychology's focus on the sexual impulse?
The author argues clinical psychology has overworked the sexual impulse, with some writers refusing to recognize other modes of disturbance. He explains the intensity and organic ramifications of the sexual instinct produce noticeable cases, and social taboos and secrecy impose greater strain on it. He notes that comparable taboos on hunger would produce similar disturbance.
Chapter 32
Section 334 cards
According to Dewey, what is the true foe of freedom—convention itself or rigid convention?
Dewey argues that not convention but stupid and rigid convention is the foe. Viewing institutions as enemies of freedom and all conventions as slaveries denies the only means by which positive freedom in action can be secured. Convention and custom are necessary to carry impulse to a happy conclusion; a romantic return to nature without regard to environment ends in chaos.
Chapter 33
On whom does Dewey place the cost of revolutions?
Dewey argues the cost of revolutions must be charged to those who aim at arresting custom instead of readjusting it. The rebel is a product of extreme fixation and unintelligent immobilities; if conditions do not permit continuous renewal, it takes place explosively. Only those who put as much effort into reconstruction as rebels put into destruction have the right to criticize radicals.
Chapter 33
What is the moral correlate of liberated impulse, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues the moral correlate of liberated impulse is not immediate activity but reflection upon how to use impulse to renew disposition and reorganize habit. Escape from custom lets people do old things in new ways and construct new ends and means. Breach in the crust of custom releases impulses, but it is the work of intelligence to find ways of using them.
Chapter 33
How do habits affect intellect, in Dewey's account?
Dewey argues habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency, operating on intellect in two ways. They restrict its reach and fix its boundaries, confining thought to the road ahead. Outside habits, thought works gropingly in confused uncertainty; yet habit completed in routine shuts thought in so effectually it is no longer needed. All habit-forming begins an intellectual specialization that, unchecked, ends in thoughtless action.
Chapter 33
Section 343 cards
What does Dewey call the most pervasive fallacy in philosophy?
The author argues it is the supposition that whatever is true under certain conditions may be asserted universally, without limits or conditions. His example: because a thirsty man is satisfied by drinking water, one concludes bliss means being drowned. Success and satisfaction, he argues, are meaningless when severed from the specific wants and struggles they fulfill.
Chapter 34
How does Dewey describe the relationship between habit and knowledge?
Dewey argues concrete habits do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging, and reasoning; a separate knower or 'consciousness' is a myth. Yet habit alone does not know, since it does not stop to think, and impulse alone cannot know either. A delicate combination of habit and impulse is required for observation, memory, and judgment.
Chapter 34
What ideal does Dewey criticize as a static perfection, and which thinkers does he cite?
The author argues the ideal of a completed activity, a static perfection, treats desire and need as deficiency. He traces it through Aristotle's self-sufficing thought, Oriental morals ending in Nirvana, medieval heavenly bliss, Herbert Spencer's final evolutionary adaptation, popular notions of being beyond temptation, and Kant's ideal union of virtue and joy.
Chapter 34
Section 354 cards
According to Dewey, when do conscious feeling and thought arise?
Dewey argues that consciousness arises when habits are impeded: a novel factor in the surroundings releases an impulse that conflicts with organized habit, forcing a redistribution of activity. Smoothly functioning habits operate unconsciously; only a hitch occasions emotion and provokes thought. He compares this to a traveler abruptly arrested, who then recollects, observes, and plans.
Chapter 35
What roles do impulse and old habit play during conscious search?
Dewey argues impulse determines the direction of movement, furnishing the focus about which reorganization swirls; it defines the search into a special unknown whose discovery restores unified action. Old habit supplies content—definite, recognizable subject-matter—so the confused situation takes on form. Without habit there is only irritation; with habit alone, machine-like repetition; with conflict and released impulse, conscious search.
Chapter 35
How does Dewey describe the objects of knowledge in terms of habits?
Dewey argues that observed, recollected, and projected objects represent habits turned inside out, exhibiting both habit's onward tendency and the objective conditions incorporated within it. They surface because habits are disintegrating under conflicting impulses, yet they also gather together to comprehend impulse and make it effective. A baby knows little and an adult much because of prior habits, not a "mind."
Chapter 35
Why does Dewey call unity prospective and objects retrospective in knowledge?
Dewey argues that when habits are impeded and impulse released, the impulse's forward tendency constitutes the prospective, unifying, "ideal" side of knowledge—we strive to unify responses. What we know, the definite objects, are retrospective: conditions mastered and incorporated in the past, discriminated and analytic, and "real." Unity is sought; division is given. He says this matters for moral beliefs and judgments of right and wrong.
Chapter 35
Section 364 cards
Why does Dewey link belief in a separate moral faculty to a separate domain of moral values?
The author argues that positing a special organ of moral knowledge implies belief in a separate and independent subject-matter. If knowing generally is thought to be the work of a special agent, there is a logical pull toward a special agent for moral distinctions. The real issue is whether moral values and principles form an independent domain or are part of a normal life process.
Chapter 36
How does Dewey use the example of typing or aviation to explain the impulse to know?
The author argues there is a habitual disposition to know, but in the same sense there is an impulse to aviate or run a typewriter. Some activities result in knowledge as others result in these things; when the product is valued, knowledge-getting becomes a definite occupation, confirmed by education. But there is no more an original separate power in one case than the other; every habit is impulsive.
Chapter 36
What two traits of utilitarian psychology does Dewey criticize, and what reaction does it provoke?
The author argues the utilitarian school follows a false psychology with two traits: knowledge originates from sensations rather than habits and impulses, and moral judgment is calculation of agreeable and disagreeable consequences, profit and loss. This seems to degrade morals and be false to facts, provoking orthodox moralists to demand a separate department for morals and a separate organ of moral knowledge.
Chapter 36
What does Dewey say about Aristotle's view of pure knowing and its ethical consequence?
The author notes Aristotle asserted the faculty of pure knowing enters a man from without as through a door. Many since have asserted knowing and doing have no intrinsic connection, that reason has no responsibility to experience, and that conscience is a sublime oracle independent of education and social influences. Dewey argues these views follow from failing to recognize knowing as an acquired result of natural impulses working with environment.
Chapter 36
Section 373 cards
How does Dewey define choice, and what error does he identify about preference?
Dewey defines choice as hitting in imagination upon an object that furnishes an adequate stimulus to recover overt action; energy is released and the mind is made up. He calls it a great error to suppose we have no preferences until choice occurs. The occasion of deliberation is an excess of incompatible preferences, not apathy. Choice is the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences, not preference out of indifference.
Chapter 37
What distinguishes reasonable from unreasonable choice in Dewey's account?
Dewey argues choice is unreasonable when an object simply stimulates some impulse to temporary intensity, overrides competitors, and sweeps us off our feet arbitrarily. Choice is reasonable when the object unifies and harmonizes competing tendencies, releasing an activity in which all are fulfilled in a sublimated, transformed fashion. Reasonableness is a quality of effective relationship among desires, not something opposed to desire.
Chapter 37
How does Dewey resolve the controversy between desire and reason in conduct?
Dewey argues reasonableness is a quality of an effective relationship among desires rather than a thing opposed to desire. It signifies the order, perspective, and proportion achieved during deliberation out of incompatible preferences. Choice is reasonable when it induces us to act with regard to the claims of each competing habit and impulse. Dewey adds that bad habits can be subdued only by being utilized as elements in a new, more comprehensive scheme of action, and good ones preserved from rot only by similar use.
Chapter 37
Section 384 cards
According to James, how does passion keep itself dominant over contrary thoughts?
The author cites William James: passion keeps imagination dwelling on congenial objects that feed it and intensify its force, until thought of other objects is crowded out. A strongly emotional impulse magnifies congruous objects and smothers opposed ones. A passionate activity may even work itself up artificially, as Cromwell indulged fits of anger to justify what conscience opposed.
Chapter 38
What does Dewey mean by saying reason is a noun, not a force?
The author argues rationality is not a force to evoke against impulse and habit but a working harmony among diverse desires. 'Reason' as a noun names the happy cooperation of dispositions like sympathy, curiosity, exploration, frankness, and circumspection. It is a resulting disposition, not a ready-made antecedent invoked at will. Science itself grows from slight impulses to handle, hunt, mix, and talk, organized into method.
Chapter 38
What are the vices of reflection that Dewey warns against?
The author argues reflection has vices as well as impulse. We may become overinterested in reflection's delights, afraid of decisive choice, or 'sicklied over by a pale cast of thought.' We may give begrudged attention to immediate matters, fancying love of truth when indulging a pet occupation. Devoted thinkers may be unthinking in personal relationships; exact scholars may be vague in ordinary matters, showing humility in one field and pettiness in another.
Chapter 38
How does deliberation differ from utilitarian profit-and-loss calculation?
The author argues deliberation's office is not to supply inducement by figuring out where most advantage lies. It resolves entanglements in existing activity, restores continuity, recovers harmony, and redirects habit, beginning in troubled activity and ending in a course that straightens it out. It resembles an actor in a drama, not a clerk recording debits and credits. We do not act from reasoning; reasoning presents objects to which we then react directly.
Chapter 38
Section 394 cards
How does Dewey say joy and suffering actually function in deliberation?
Dewey argues they operate through experiencing present reactions, not by calculating future delights and miseries. Objects presented in imagination trigger complacency or annoyance just as sensed objects do: some fit and are welcome, others rasp and cut across activity. We are now delighted or depressed at what is imagined, and this running commentary of likes and dislikes reveals a person's own character to anyone who studies its occasions.
Chapter 39
What is Dewey's first objection to deliberation as calculation of future feelings?
He argues it makes an abnormal case the standard one. The calculative theory treats future feelings as the subject-matter and actions as external means, advising concentration on one's own most subjective and private feelings. This leaves only sickly introspection or an intricate calculus of remote, indeterminate results. Deliberation is actually outlooking toward objective situations; dwelling on future feelings marks sentimental moments of self-pity or self-glorification, producing morbidity and isolation.
Chapter 39
Why does Dewey say future pleasures and pains resist calculation?
They depend on two variables independent of present choice: one's own state at a future moment and surrounding circumstances. Things sweet in anticipation turn bitter in taste; what we now avoid may later be welcome. Changes in the waxing and waning of activity are unavoidable, apart from deep character shifts. The further into the future and the more others' pleasures enter the account, the more hopeless estimation becomes, since all elements grow indeterminate.
Chapter 39
What does Dewey say a person's estimate of future consequences actually reveals?
It is a projection of what now satisfies and annoys him, and thus a better index of his present character than a prediction of future results. A considerate person feels hurt at the thought of harming others and ranks such consequences high, perhaps to the point of excessive sensitivity. An executive type engrossed in a scheme glides over the pain it brings others. What one foresees, values, dwells on, or forgets depends on character.
Chapter 39
Section 404 cards
How does Dewey distinguish utilitarianism from epicureanism?
The author argues utilitarianism belonged to a nineteenth-century philanthropic reform movement, using its calculus to foster wide social outlook and concern for collective legislation. Epicureanism, by contrast, was worldly-wise, urging people to let the future go and cultivate present pleasures, since life is uncertain. Dewey notes this difference despite similarities in their professed psychologies.
Chapter 40
What is the real object of foresight of consequences, according to Dewey?
Dewey argues foresight does not aim to predict the future. Its purpose is to ascertain the meaning of present activities and secure a present activity with unified meaning. We are not creators of heaven and earth and cannot dominate the future; our concern is the significance of the small fraction of activity that starts from ourselves.
Chapter 40
What does Dewey say deliberation actually appraises?
Deliberation appraises present proposed actions, not future happenings. We judge present desires and habits by their tendency to produce certain consequences, watching what our habits and dispositions signify. Future outcomes are uncertain, but tendencies—like those of malice, charity, conceit, or patience—are knowable through observed consequences and imaginative forecasts.
Chapter 40
How does Dewey define good or satisfaction?
Good consists in the meaning experienced as belonging to an activity when conflicting impulses and habits terminate in a unified, orderly release in action. This human good is conditioned on thought, unlike pleasures animals hit upon accidentally. Dewey adds that false goods—superficial compromises or unity by suppression—are revealed by subsequent events, and wrongdoers grow less able to detect these revelations.
Chapter 40
Section 414 cards
According to Dewey, why is the good never exactly repeated?
The author argues each good is unique because it resolves a distinctive complication of competing habits and impulses that can never repeat itself. Only a habit rigid to the point of immobility could produce the same good twice—but with such rigid routines the good does not even occur, since there is no consciousness of good or bad at all.
Chapter 41
What credit does Dewey give to utilitarianism and Bentham despite their defects?
The author credits utilitarianism with enforcing unforgettably that moral good consists in a satisfaction of the forces of human nature—welfare, happiness. To Bentham he attributes the imperishable renown of forcing home that "conscience" is too often veiled caprice, dogmatic ipse dixitism, or vested class interest, and is truly conscience only as it relieves misery and promotes happiness.
Chapter 41
What catastrophe does Dewey say utilitarianism runs into regarding the good?
The author argues the catastrophe is thinking the good to which intelligence is pertinent consists in future pleasures and pains, with moral reflection as their algebraic calculus. Against this, he holds that good and happiness are found in the present meaning of activity, depending on the proportion, order and freedom thought introduces by discovering objects that release and unify contending elements.
Chapter 41
How does Dewey explain the one-sided course utilitarianism took?
The author cites the domination of intellectual interest by economic considerations. The industrial revolution fixed attention on bettering this world through control of natural forces, but old institutions and habits persisted and deflected the new movement. Happiness was thus modeled on business: a maximum net gain of pleasures, calculated like profit and loss in fixed monetary units, with reason merely enlightening the search for gain.
Chapter 41
Section 424 cards
According to Dewey, what is deliberation actually a work of?
The author argues deliberation is a work of discovery, not an attempt to eliminate opposition by reducing it to quantity. Because we do not know the meaning of tendencies pressing for action, we must search and experiment. Deliberation uncovers the conflict in full scope, revealing what difference each impulse and habit imports and the different situations into which they plunge us.
Chapter 42
What does Dewey say is actually at stake in serious deliberation?
The author argues the real stake is not a difference of quantity but what kind of person one is to become, what sort of self is in the making, and what kind of world is making. Career choices like merchant versus teacher involve incompatible selves and habits, not quantities. Minor decisions differ in range but not principle, since crucial decisions disclose the cumulative force of trivial choices.
Chapter 42
Why does Dewey distinguish economic calculation from genuine deliberation?
The author argues that in deciding whether to invest in this bond or that stock, the question of the kind of activity has already been settled, so only quantitative calculation remains. Business deliberation concerns strictly instrumental pecuniary gain, never direct use in experience. Reducing all judgments of action to this simplified case of calculation misses the whole point of deliberation.
Chapter 42
How does Dewey characterize the 'economic man' and love of pecuniary gain?
The author argues the calculating 'economic man' is morally objectionable because the conception empirically falsifies facts. Love of pecuniary gain is real and powerful, but it is a social, not psychological, primary fact; it depends on other impulses and habits and organizes their use. Like steeple-chasing or stamp collecting, it is a special case of desire subject to criticism and valuation.
Chapter 42
Section 434 cards
What does Dewey say is the actual error of utilitarianism?
The author argues utilitarianism's error is not exaggerating reflection's role but holding a false conception of what reflection and deliberation are. He insists impulse and habit are primary determinants of conduct, yet this makes cultivation of thought more necessary, not less. Converting the fact that people are not moved by self-interest into dismissing consideration of consequences fosters an obscurantist doctrine of trusting impulse, instinct, or intuition.
Chapter 43
How does Dewey define ends-in-view, and where do they function?
Ends are foreseen consequences that influence present deliberation and bring it to rest by furnishing adequate stimulus to overt action. They arise and function within action, not beyond it. Strictly they are terminals of deliberation, turning points in activity, not termini of action. Dewey rejects the view, shared by utilitarians and their critics alike, that ends such as pleasure, perfection, or self-realization lie outside and beyond activity.
Chapter 43
What historical persistence of fixed ends does Dewey describe?
Dewey says Aristotle foisted on western culture the view that change realizes an immanent perfect form, and it endured two thousand years. When the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution expelled fixed ends from natural science, the doctrine logically should have vanished from moral theory too. But the author argues people keep old beliefs after surrendering their logical basis, so fixed ends-in-themselves persisted in morals, dislocating moral from natural science.
Chapter 43
What do the shooting and mariner examples illustrate about aims?
Dewey says people first throw and shoot as instinctive reactions; observing results gives the activity new meaning, so they take aim and make targets. Targets are set up so throwing becomes more effective and significant. Likewise a mariner sails by the stars, not toward them, and the harbor is a point where present activity needs re-direction, as truly a beginning of new activity as a termination of the old.
Chapter 43
Section 444 cards
Why does Dewey say the end-thought-of is uniquely important?
Dewey argues the end-thought-of is uniquely important because it gives the decisive clew to the act to be performed under existing circumstances. It is the particular foreseen object that stimulates action to relieve existing troubles or entanglements. He insists this does not mean it is objectively the most important consequence; a man exercising his profession does not ordinarily think of sustaining his family, yet that result may matter most.
Chapter 44
What happens when ends are treated as literal ends to action?
Dewey argues that treating ends as literal ends rather than directive stimuli to present choice freezes and isolates them. Whether the end is a natural good like health or a moral good like honesty, setting it up as complete and exclusive leads to narrowness and, in extreme cases, fanaticism, inconsiderateness, arrogance, and hypocrisy. He compares this to expecting Joshua's miracle of arresting the course of events.
Chapter 44
How does Dewey respond to the maxim that the end justifies the means?
Dewey says there is no such thing as the single all-important end, so not the end in the singular justifies the means. Overlooking means is a device for failing to note consequences that would estop action. Nothing justifies or condemns means except ends, but all consequences must be included impartially. He compares picking one liked consequence to a finger held close to the eye that seems to cover a mountain.
Chapter 44
What error does Dewey find in moralists who deny consequences matter?
Dewey argues moralists who say motives rather than consequences justify acts only appear to deny consequences. In reality they set up a subjective consequence, 'meaning well,' as the all-justifying end to be cultivated at all hazards. Dewey calls the result sentimental, futile complacency rather than brutal efficiency, and says this doctrine is if anything more contemptible, since it shrinks from responsibility for actual results and lends itself to self-deception.
Chapter 44
Section 454 cards
According to Dewey, what are ends actually, and why do people treat them as fixed?
The author argues ends are devices of intelligence for guiding action, instrumental to freeing and harmonizing troubled tendencies, and are literally endless since new activities produce new consequences. People treat them as fixed and external because rigid, non-interacting habits lead them to see only consequences matching their habitual courses, projecting their own compartmental habits onto ends.
Chapter 45
What two harms does the doctrine of fixed ends cause, according to the chapter?
The author argues it diverts attention from examining consequences and intelligently creating purpose, and, since means and ends are two ways of regarding the same actuality, it makes people careless about inspecting present conditions. An aim not framed from present conditions falls back on past habits, producing failure, discouragement, and the consolation that ideals are too noble for this world.
Chapter 45
How does a mere wish or fancy become a working aim or purpose?
The author argues it begins as a wish, an emotional reaction against present conditions projecting an imagined satisfying scene, which alone is fantasy. It becomes an aim only when worked out in terms of concrete conditions available for realization — means — by studying how a like result already occurs naturally, joining knowledge of causation to wish.
Chapter 45
What does Dewey say about the divorce of moral ends from scientific study of natural events?
The author argues that in technical matters the lesson that discovering how things occur enables willing their happening is fairly well learned, but in moral matters people still neglect studying how desired results actually happen, despising mechanism as low and material. This divorce renders moral ends impotent wishes and compensatory dreams, while in fact ends remain determined by fixed habit and circumstance.
Chapter 45
Section 464 cards
What does Dewey say lies behind the belief in fixed ends and principles?
The author argues that belief in fixed ends and fixed principles rests on a love of certainty—a demand for guarantees in advance of action, born of fear of the new and attachment to possessions. Dogmatism, he says, turns truth into an insurance company, and fixed ends and authoritative rules become props for a feeling of safety, the refuge of the timid and the means by which the bold prey upon the timid.
Chapter 46
How does Dewey describe the nature and function of moral principles?
The author argues principles are intellectually what habits are for direct action: methods of inquiry and forecast requiring verification by events, not fixed rules applied directly. They exist as hypotheses to experiment with, and past experimentation has given many a well-earned prestige that should not be lightly disregarded. But as social situations alter, principles must be revised, adapted, expanded and altered—continuous, vital readaptation.
Chapter 46
Why does Dewey claim casuistry should be praised rather than condemned?
The author argues casuistry is the only conclusion properly drawn from belief in fixed universal principles, just as the Jesuit maxim that the end justifies the means follows from belief in fixed ends. Since every act is individual, fixed general rules only make sense if they confer certainty on particular cases. So those who accept immutable regulating principles ought to laud casuistry for sincerity and helpfulness rather than dispraise it.
Chapter 46
What does Dewey say about the demand for a fixed standard to compare values?
The author argues the demand for a fixed measure of values, like a foot-rule, is another manifestation of the wish to escape the strain of the actual moral situation and its genuine uncertainty. Even the foot-rule is only a tool worked out in prior comparisons, defined by conditions and relations, not fixed in itself. The issue is one of fact, and the critic may not enforce a private wish for a ready-made standard.
Chapter 46
Section 474 cards
According to Dewey, when did astronomy actually begin to advance?
Dewey argues astronomy did not advance while men judged astronomical phenomena by bringing them under established geometrical truths, which produced only a private esthetic construction. Astronomy began when men trusted themselves to embark on the uncertain sea of events and were willing to be instructed by changes in the concrete. Antecedent principles were then employed tentatively as hypotheses for conducting observations and organizing facts.
Chapter 47
What does Dewey say is the alternative to fixity of moral principles?
Dewey argues the alternative to fixed principles and aims is continuity of growth, not atomism. Because situations calling for deliberation are new and unique, general principles are needed as tools to direct attention to resemblances and differences and to economize foresight. Calling a generalization a tool does not make it useless; a tool is something to use and improve by noting how it works.
Chapter 47
How does Dewey evaluate Kant's method of universalizing motives?
Dewey says Kant's treatment shows deep insight into the office of intelligence and principle in conduct, but it flatly contradicts Kant's own intention to exclude concrete consequences. Asking whether a motive could be universal turns out to be a method of recommending a broad, impartial view of consequences. Dewey argues forming this habit safeguards deliberation against passion and habit treating one's own case as exceptional.
Chapter 47
What does Dewey mean by saying reason is an outcome or function?
Dewey argues reason is not a primitive force but an outcome and function. What we need are habits and dispositions that lead to impartial and consistent foresight of consequences; then our judgments are reasonable and we are reasonable creatures. The demand for consistency and universality is a demand to survey consequences broadly and link effect to effect in a chain of continuity.
Chapter 47
Section 484 cards
According to Dewey, what is the object of desire compared to its actual outcome?
Dewey argues the object desired and the attainment of desire differ in dimension, not degree—like a signboard versus the garage it points to. The object is the environmental condition that, if present, would reunify obstructed activity; it is the sine qua non of the end, not the end itself.
Chapter 48
When does desire arise, and what is its actual result when satisfied?
Dewey holds that desire arises only when the push of life-activity meets obstruction, dispersing activity. Satisfied desire does not yield pure quiescence but equilibration—the recovery of unified activity and absence of internal strife among habits and instincts. He calls this a positive naming of the outcome rather than a negative one.
Chapter 48
How does Dewey respond to critics who say his theory overemphasizes intelligence?
Dewey answers by analyzing desire independently, showing that intellect's role is not cold detachment but figuring the means to reorganize activity. He argues the object of desire is a condition for restoring unified conduct, so thought and wish have distinct offices in forming ends rather than intellect merely freezing generous desire.
Chapter 48
What explains self-deception, according to Dewey, and what distinguishes the honest mind?
Dewey argues the disparity between the object thought of and the outcome reached is unavoidable, so self-deception lies not in that gap but in refusing to note the quality of the outcome—e.g., masked revenge or vanity. The honest or integral mind attends to the result and sees what it really is, since every consummation is also a causal force.
Chapter 48
Section 494 cards
According to Dewey, what is the origin of self-deception?
Dewey argues self-deception originates in looking at an outcome in only one direction—as a satisfaction of what came before—while ignoring that what is attained is a state of habits that will continue in action and determine future results. Satisfied revenge may feel like justice vindicated, and the prestige of learning may feel like an enlarged objective outlook, yet they are dynamically unlike because different instincts and habits entered into them.
Chapter 49
What does Dewey mean by calling people 'natural Jack Horners'?
Dewey argues people attribute satisfactory results to personal virtue when a plum arrives after they put in some effort, though results and efforts are always more or less incommensurate because outcomes depend partly on circumstance. This retrospective halo constructs heroes and leaders and constitutes the worship of success. Dewey holds that success is never merely terminal: something else succeeds it, and persisting habits and impulses influence what comes after.
Chapter 49
How does Dewey describe impulse, and what role does intelligence play toward it?
Dewey holds impulse is primary and intelligence secondary and in some sense derivative, but this exalts intelligence rather than degrading it. Impulse does not know what it is after, cannot give orders, and rushes blindly into any opening, since any outlet satisfies it. Intelligence should act not as impulse's obedient servant but as its clarifier and liberator, converting desire into systematic plans based on assembling facts, reporting events, and analyzing them.
Chapter 49
Why does Dewey say glorifying affection at the expense of thought is a survival of romantic optimism?
Dewey argues it assumes a pre-established harmony between natural impulse and natural objects, a harmony that would let generous feeling find its way by sheer nobility of quality. He notes literary-minded persons are as prone to this fallacy as specialists are to the opposite one that theorizing apart from impulse and habit suffices. Ideals in fact are balked, so we idealize in fancy; carrying them through requires observation, memory, and foresight wedding imagination to organized habit.
Chapter 49
Section 504 cards
What does Dewey call the great moral tragedy?
The author argues the great moral tragedy is the separation of warm emotion and cool intelligence. He says this division is perpetuated both by those who deprecate science and foresight in behalf of affection and by those who, in the name of an idol labeled reason, would quench passion. Emotion without thought is unstable, rising and subsiding like the tide regardless of what it accomplished.
Chapter 50
According to Dewey, what happens to emotion without thought?
The author argues emotion without thought is unstable: it rises like the tide and subsides like the tide irrespective of what it has accomplished. It is easily diverted into side channels dug by old habits or cool cunning, or disperses aimlessly. Then disillusionment follows, and men turn more fiercely to narrow ends where they are habituated to use observation and planning.
Chapter 50
How does Dewey describe the popular notion of the ideal?
The author argues the popular ideal is a contradictory mix of desire and thought: it keeps emotion's vagueness while simulating thought's definiteness. It becomes a far-away, transcendental, supernatural perfection defined only by contrast with the actual, impossible to realize yet regarded as the source of discontent and inspiration. Instead of organizing effort, it operates as a compensatory dream and asylum from effort.
Chapter 50
What does Dewey say is the sole meaning of aims and purposes?
The author argues the sole meaning of aims and purposes is to liberate and guide present action out of its perplexities and confusions. Foreseen ends mark a little island in an infinite sea of other consequences, but their slight extent does not matter, since their function is to bring future possibilities into the present and free and expand present tendencies.
Chapter 50
Section 513 cards
According to the chapter, what is the office of art and religion?
The author argues that art and religion exist to evoke appreciations and intimations of the vast, immeasurable meaning of present acts, and to enhance and steady them until they are wrought into the texture of our lives. This ideal is not a goal to be attained but a significance to be felt and appreciated, won only by those willing to think.
Chapter 51
How does the chapter criticize defining religious consciousness as beginning after moral and intellectual consciousness?
The author argues this view is correct only in that definite purposes shade off into a vast whole incapable of objective presentation. But philosophers falsify it by treating religious consciousness as coming after striving, resolution and foresight, making morality and science a striving and religion a moral holiday. The author insists the effortless whole is felt in the midst of effort, not after it.
Chapter 51
What does the chapter say about happiness and reasonableness in morals?
The author argues happiness is fundamental in morals not because it is sought for, but because it is now attained, even amid pain and trouble, whenever recognition of our ties with nature and fellow-men releases and informs our action. Reasonableness is necessary because it perceives the continuities that take action out of immediateness and isolation into connection with past and future.
Chapter 51
Section 523 cards
In Dewey's house-building example, what is the only activity really under a man's control?
The present activity of building. Dewey notes the man may die before the house is built, his finances may change, or he may move away; trying to provide for all contingencies prevents action. The future's control depends on treating present activity as an end, not a means, and the house when built is a means entering a new present activity.
Chapter 52
How does Dewey characterize traditional education's relation to the present and future?
The author argues traditional education subordinates the living present to a remote, precarious future, with 'to prepare, to get ready' as its keynote. The actual outcome is inadequate preparation and blind rule-of-thumb tradition, or in some industrial education projects, one class securing its future at another's expense. Education as full use of present resources would make young lives richer.
Chapter 52
According to Dewey, what does the skilled artisan's enjoyment of work illustrate?
The author argues that although the artisan knows his product is made for future use, the sense of its utility is a factor in the present significance of his action, giving play to taste and skill and accomplishing something now. Reference to future products enhances perception of an immanent meaning rather than subjecting present activity to remote ends.
Chapter 52
Section 534 cards
According to Dewey, where is harmony of social interests actually found?
Dewey argues harmony of social interests is found in the widespread sharing of activities significant in themselves—that is, at the point of consumption, understood as fulfilment, replenishing, and growth of mind and body. Forcing production apart from consumption, he claims, produces the belief that class struggle is a means of social progress rather than a register of barriers to it.
Chapter 53
How does Dewey describe the 'idealist' who sets up a remote goal as the ideal?
The author argues the professed idealist sets up a remote goal rather than fullness of meaning in the present, evacuating the present of meaning and treating appreciation, joy, and peace in present activity as suspect diversions. Since human nature must have present realization, a sentimental, romantic enjoyment of the ideal substitutes for intelligent activity and serves as an anodyne to misery.
Chapter 53
What does Dewey say about the 'practical man' seeking a future good?
Dewey argues the practical man wants something definite and tangible, looking for 'a good thing' as others seek 'a good time.' Yet his activity is impractical: he seeks satisfaction elsewhere than where it can be found, empties present activity of meaning by making it a mere instrumentality, and when the future arrives it is only another despised present. Sensuality is the inevitable recourse, usually worked out as a compromise.
Chapter 53
What concrete evidence does Dewey offer that inquiry and planning can determine events?
Dewey cites the development of a chain of nation-wide tobacco shops, a well-managed national telephone system, and the extension of an electric-light plant's service as proof that study, reflection, and planning do sometimes determine a course of events, seen in engineering management and commercial expansion. He admits such potency is limited to matters called technical, and concludes we as yet have no technique in important economic, political, and international affairs.
Chapter 53
Section 542 cards
According to the chapter, what makes deliberate action distinctively moral?
The author argues that only deliberate action—conduct into which reflective choice enters—is distinctively moral, because only then does the question of better and worse arise. Yet he warns it is a perilous error to draw a hard line between deliberated action and activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit, since each can pass into the other.
Chapter 54
How does the chapter define morals in relation to growth and education?
The author argues morality is a continuing process, not a fixed achievement: morals means growth of conduct in meaning, consequent upon observing the conditions and outcome of conduct. Growing and growth are the same fact. In the largest sense, morals is education—learning the meaning of what we are about and employing that meaning in action.
Chapter 54
Section 554 cards
What does Dewey say evolution actually means, against the common misreading?
The author argues evolution means continuity of change, not subordination of present change to a future goal. He rejects the "futile dogma of approximation" in favor of a gospel of present growth, holding that significant stages appear in crises where fixed habits give way to newly released capacities—times of readjustment and redirection.
Chapter 55
According to Dewey, what does every genuine accomplishment do to the practical situation?
The author argues every genuine accomplishment complicates the practical situation rather than closing it. It effects a new distribution of energies to be employed in ways past experience gives no exact instruction for. Every important satisfaction of an old want creates a new one, requiring an experimental adventure to find satisfaction. Achievement settles something from the past side but introduces new problems from the future side.
Chapter 55
Why does Dewey say the idea of inspiration from an infinite goal actually produces despair?
The author argues that telling people their achievements are negligible compared with an infinite goal brings discouragement, not inspiration. Every endeavor seems bound to fail and every satisfaction a disappointment, so the honest conclusion is pessimism. He holds that positive attainment—enrichment of meaning and powers—opens new vistas and sets new tasks, renewing courage and hope.
Chapter 55
Where does Dewey say instruction about what to do next must come from?
The author argues instruction in what to do next can never come from an infinite goal, which for us is bound to be empty. It can be derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation. He notes new struggles and failures remain inevitable, but this situation is a consequence of expansion and a challenge to intelligence.
Chapter 55
Section 563 cards
For Dewey, why does man continue to live, rather than from reasoned conviction?
The author argues man continues to live because he is a living creature, not because reason convinces him of future satisfactions. He is instinct with activities that carry him on, possessing endurance, hope, curiosity, eagerness, and love of action by structure, not by taking thought. Memory and foresight make these traits somewhat articulate, so failure loses fatality and suffering yields instruction rather than bitterness.
Chapter 56
How does Dewey criticize idealistic philosophies like Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza?
Dewey says these philosophies locate the good in conscious life and reason rather than external achievement, and exalt intelligence in securing fulfilment. But they set up a transcendental meaning remote from and opposed to present experience, or demand special knowledge inaccessible to the common man. They treat regeneration as wholesale and self-enclosed rather than continuous reconstruction of ordinary experience.
Chapter 56
Why does Dewey object to Epicureanism, and what is his test for social reform?
Dewey says Epicureanism rightly centers on what is within control and finds good in the present, but it conceives present good as withdrawal rather than active participation, failing to connect it with the full reach of activities. His moral measure for any arrangement or reform is its effect on impulse and habits: does it liberate or suppress, quicken perception, and widen the horizon of others?
Chapter 56
Section 574 cards
What does Dewey say almost all influential moral theories have refused to admit?
The author argues that almost all influential moral theories, except utilitarianism, have refused to admit that morals grows out of specific empirical facts. Instead, morality has been tied to supernatural commands, rewards, and penalties, or to a split between the actual and the ideal in which the actual world is treated as incapable of generating moral values.
Chapter 57
How does Dewey describe human nature's relation to its environment?
The author argues human nature is not 'in' its environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in sunlight and soil: continuous with its energies, dependent on its support, and capable of increase only as it uses them. Therefore physics, chemistry, history, statistics, and engineering are part of disciplined moral knowledge when they illuminate the conditions of human life.
Chapter 57
What error does Dewey identify in the doctrine of accord with nature?
The author argues that theorists reacting against separating morals from facts went to the opposite extreme, insisting natural laws are themselves moral laws so one need only conform. This doctrine, seen in Stoicism, eighteenth-century deism, and Spencer's evolutionism, treats natural evolution as the exact model of human endeavor and makes justice identical with cause and effect.
Chapter 57
According to Dewey, what is the fundamental defect of accord-with-nature views?
The author argues their fundamental defect is failing to see the difference perception makes in conditions and energies. Knowledge of facts does not entail conformity; perception of things as they are is a stage in making them different. Morality resides not in perception of fact but in the use made of it—whether to conform, perpetuate, or vary conditions and consequences.
Chapter 57
Section 584 cards
What role does Dewey assign to conflict in relation to thought?
The author argues conflict is the gadfly of thought: it stirs observation and memory, instigates invention, and shocks people out of sheep-like passivity into noting and contriving. He cautions it does not always produce this result, but calls conflict a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity, and says once this possibility is noted, conflict can be used systematically to substitute the arbitration of mind for brutal attack and brute collapse.
Chapter 58
How does Dewey criticize Marx's use of conflict?
The author argues Marx borrowed Hegel's dialectic idea of a necessary negative element for advance, projected it into social affairs, and concluded all social development comes from class conflict, so class warfare should be cultivated. Dewey calls this a supposedly scientific doctrine that preaches social hostility as the road to social harmony, and says it is a striking instance of giving natural events a social and practical sanctification.
Chapter 58
What three elements does Dewey say liberty has historically contained?
Dewey says what men have esteemed and fought for as liberty contains three elements: efficiency in action, the ability to carry out plans without cramping obstacles; capacity to vary plans, change course, and experience novelties; and the power of desire and choice to be factors in events. He notes these are not all directly compatible with one another, and that few would trade monotony for efficient action.
Chapter 58
According to Dewey, what is the key to freedom in action?
The author argues intelligence is the key to freedom in act. We prosper in the degree we consult conditions and form a plan enlisting their consenting cooperation. He says luck favors the intelligent and shows its back to the stupid, and that in neutral or adverse circumstances study and foresight are the only roads to unimpeded action. Insisting on metaphysical free will, he argues, pays for its contempt of facts with halting, confined action.
Chapter 58
Section 594 cards
According to the chapter, what is the relation of natural freedom to political freedom?
The author argues natural freedom is prior to political freedom and is its condition: a harmony between a man's energies and surroundings such that the latter support his purposes. Without this basic natural support, deliberate legislation, administration, and social arrangements cannot take place. Yet natural freedom alone is at the mercy of accident, so conscious agreements must supplement and partly supplant it.
Chapter 59
How does the chapter say the relation of individual freedom to organization should be judged?
The author argues it is an experimental affair, not settleable by abstract theory. Questions like labor unions and the closed or open shop should be judged by concrete consequences — the balance of freedom and security achieved compared with practicable alternatives. Even where membership becomes coercive is a matter for scientific study of pros and cons, a question of specific detail rather than wholesale theory.
Chapter 59
What does the chapter say organization tends to do to freedom?
Organization tends to become rigid and to limit freedom. Beyond security and energy in action, the author argues freedom requires novelty, risk, and change; variety is largely of the essence of life, marking the difference between free and enslaved. True excellence changes with conditions, and choice requires unrealized and precarious possibilities. Invariant virtue seems as mechanical as uninterrupted vice.
Chapter 59
How does the chapter treat the doctrine of freedom of indifference?
The author argues the demand for genuine contingency is caricatured in the orthodox doctrine of freedom of indifference — a power to choose apart from habit, impulse, or even desire. Such indetermination of choice is not desired by lovers of reason or excitement; it hardens vague uncertainty of conditions into a desirable attribute of will. Uncertainty of volition beyond that of conditions marks imbecility of character.
Chapter 59
Section 604 cards
For Dewey, what measures our freedom?
Dewey argues freedom is measured by foreseeing future objective alternatives and, through deliberation, choosing one and weighting its chances in the struggle for future existence. The question is not what antecedents produce deliberation and choice but what consequences they bring: control of future possibilities. Without this control we are pushed from behind; with it we walk in the light.
Chapter 60
How does Dewey use the ox and yoke to criticize Tolstoi?
Tolstoi, expressing Spinoza and Hegel, said the ox is free once it willingly accepts the yoke, but Dewey objects that a yoke remains a yoke, so conscious submission is fatalistic submissiveness or cowardice. The ox really accepts the stall and hay. Only if it foresees the harvest and identifies with realizing the yoke's possibilities does it act freely, welcoming a possibility as desirable rather than accepting necessity.
Chapter 60
What does Dewey mean by saying 'It thinks' is truer than 'I think'?
Dewey argues intelligence is not ours originally or by production. Thoughts sprout from deep unconscious sources; a suggestion surges from the unknown and our active body of habits appropriates it, turning it into an assertion we act upon and whose consequences we implicate. Belief's materials come from others through education, tradition and environment. Science is an affair of civilization, not of individual intellect.
Chapter 60
According to Dewey, what is the origin of conscience and responsibility?
Dewey holds that when a child acts, others react with approval or rebuke, as natural a consequence as fire burning a hand. We rehearse others' responses in language and imagination, foreknow how they will act, and so know with them: an assembly within the breast. Liability begins responsibility; we are held accountable so we become responsive in future acts, and blame is prospective, not retrospective.
Chapter 60
Section 614 cards
What does Dewey claim about the social conditioning of all individual action?
The author argues that all actions of an individual bear the stamp of their community as surely as the language they speak. Difficulty reading this stamp comes from the variety of impressions arising from membership in many groups. This social saturation is a matter of fact, not of what should be or what is desirable, and it does not guarantee the rightness or goodness of an act.
Chapter 61
How does Dewey explain self-seeking such as money-making as a social phenomenon?
The author argues that deliberate unscrupulous self-interest depends on social opportunities, training and assistance just as benevolence does. Money is a social institution, property a legal custom, and economic opportunities depend on society's state; rewards exist because of social admiration, prestige and competition. A money-maker's individualism lies in habits acquired under social influences, not original nature.
Chapter 61
Why does Dewey object to the idea that morals ought to be social?
The author argues there is an inconsistency in saying morals ought to be social, since the 'ought' implies morals depend on something apart from social relations. Morals are social; the question of ought is a question of better and worse within social affairs. He measures how blindly social forces work by how far theories have been thrown against perceiving social ties in moral activity.
Chapter 61
What does Dewey say is the chief obstacle to treating all conduct as morally judgeable?
The author argues the chief obstacle is the habit of identifying moral judgment with praise and blame. This habit makes moral judgment more emotional than intellectual, guided by custom and resentment rather than insight into causes and consequences. Fault-finding breeds resentment and defensiveness, while approval breeds complacency, rather than an impersonal, impartial habit of observation.
Chapter 61
Section 622 cards
What does Dewey claim is the fundamental fact of social life and personal character?
The author argues that the formation of habits of belief, desire and judgment goes on constantly under conditions set by people's contact, intercourse and associations. Traditional human science gives no enlightenment on this and virtually denies it. Consequently control of predispositions governing human relationships is left to accident, custom, and immediate personal likings, resentments and ambitions.
Chapter 62
What does Dewey say follows if one grants the argument for a non-empirical authority of Right?
The author argues that granting this argument brings the whole apparatus of abstract moralism: a remote goal of perfection, ideals wholesale contrary to what is actual, a free will of arbitrary choice, and a non-empirical conscience acknowledging a non-empirical authority. These conceptions form its ceremonial or formal train. He questions what would be lost if the alleged recognition were dropped.
Chapter 62
Section 634 cards
For Dewey, what is social pressure, and why is it not a non-moral force?
Dewey rejects the claim that social pressure is mere force rather than right. He argues we live mentally as physically only in and because of our environment, so social pressure names the ongoing interactions we participate in. It is empirical, meaning actual, not ideal. Considerations of right are claims originating within life, becoming ideal as we intelligently recognize and act on them.
Chapter 63
What does Dewey say failure to recognize the authority of right actually indicates?
The author argues it is a defect in effective apprehension of the realities of human association, not an arbitrary exercise of free will. This deficiency reflects a defect in education, meaning the operation of actual conditions and their consequences on desire and thought. Dewey denies everyone has a consciousness of right's supreme authority that they then misconceive or ignore.
Chapter 63
How does Dewey describe the relation between social customs and consciousness of social ties?
Dewey says we are not caught in a circle but traverse a spiral. Social customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies; that consciousness is embodied in acts which, in improving the environment, generate new perceptions of social ties, and so on. The interactions are always there as fact, but acquire meaning only in the desires, judgments and purposes they awaken.
Chapter 63
What does Dewey say has happened to religion as a sense of community?
The author argues religion has lost itself in cults, dogmas and myths, so its office as sense of community and one's place in it has been lost. It was distorted into a possession of a limited portion of humanity, a limited class such as priests, saints, a church. Religion as sense of the whole is the most individualized of things, yet it was perverted into something uniform and immutable.
Chapter 63
Section 643 cards
According to the index, what does the chapter say about the place of impulse in conduct?
The index lists impulse as occupying pages 89-171 of the work, described as having a place in conduct. It is characterized as secondary, as an intermediary, and as a means of reorganization (pages 93, 102, 104, 179). It is called plastic (95), equated with human instincts (105n), and discussed in relation to habit (107-111), with a false simplification treated at 131-149.
Chapter 64
How does the index characterize the relation between instinct and fixity?
The index entry for instinct states "not fixed" at pages 149-168, and directs the reader to impulse. It also links instinct to knowledge at page 178. This indicates the author treats instinct as malleable rather than as a fixed, predetermined force, connecting it to impulse and to knowing rather than to rigid reflex.
Chapter 64
What does the index say about the nature of ends and their relation to means?
The index treats end at pages 28 and 34-37, covering knowledge as an end (187, 215), the nature of ends (223-237), the end of desire (250, 261), and ends and means (269-272). It cross-references consequences and means. This shows ends are discussed in connection with desire, knowledge, and means rather than as isolated fixed goals.
Chapter 64
Source and licence
Text used: Project Gutenberg eBook #41386 (Public domain in the United States). Generated from the full text; cards paraphrase the source.
Version: Public domain edition. Retrieved 2026-10-29. Cards reviewed 2026-10-29.
These cards paraphrase the text for study. They are not a substitute for reading the book, and they do not reproduce long passages.
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