DEWEY'S THEORY OF VALUE

Author(s): T. V. Smith
Source: The Monist , JULY, 1922, Vol. 32, No. 3 (JULY, 1922), pp. 339-354
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27900913

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 DEWEY'S THEORY OF VALUE
I

IN THE
not onlyBELIEF
the hub of that JohnbutDewey's
his philosophy, theory of value is
that it also con
stitutes the chief contribution of Pragmatism to current
philosophy, I wish, in this paper, to show what Dewey's
theory of value is, to indicate its relations and significance,
and to adduce corroborations of the theory from certain
unexpected quarters.
No one can hope to understand Dewey's theory of value
who does not grasp rather fully the meaning that he at
taches to the term "experience." Such an intellectualiste
penumbra hangs over the word that some readers never
understand that Dewey means other than what they would
mean if they used the word in a similar connection. That
he does mean something different, and something more,
he has emphasized most vigorously in the introduction to
his Essays in Experimental Logic. It seems that Profes
sor Dewey himself did not for a long while get fully clear
the significance of the distinction; and he gives Mr. S.
Klyce credit for pointing out to him this and "other indis
pensable considerations." Upon this point Dewey ex
plains: "Our words divide into terms and into names
which are not (strictly speaking) terms at all, but which
serve to remind us of the vast and vague continuum, select
portions of which only are designated by words as terms."1
1 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 8n.

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340 THE MONIST.

Now the word "experience" and such other words are not
terms at all; they are what Mr. Clyce calls "infinity and
zero" words. As opposed to such a word as "desk" (which is
a term referring to a definite object, on which conscious
ness is or may be focussed), the word "experience" refers
to the fringe or penumbra of the situation in which "desk"
or any other term is the focus. As Dewey says: "The
word 'experience' is ... a notation of an inexpressible
as that which decides the ultimate status of all which is
expressed; inexpressible not because it is so remote and
transcendent, but because it is so immediately engrossing
and matter of course."2 Such a word, then, connotes what
is before and after and around that which at any given
time is denoted. "I shall only point out," says Dewey,
"that when the word 'experience' is employed in the text,
it means just such an immense and operative world of
diverse and interacting elements."3
Experience, as this will indicate, is a much broader
term than knowledge. Instead, therefore, of putting the
auestion as some philosophers have, i. e., whether there
are different ways of knowing, we must cease begging the
auestion and ask whether there are not different ways of
experiencing, of which knowing is only one. We certainly
must be content to put the matter in this way, if we are to
understand Dewey ; for Dewey makes this point in wholly
unambiguous language. "Knowing," says he, "is one
mode of experiencing, and the primary philosophic de
mand . . . is to find out what sort of an experience know
ing is?or, concretely how things are experienced when
they are experience as known things. ... To assume that,
because from the standpoint of the knowledge experience
things are what they are known to be, therefore, meta
physically, absolutely, without qualification, everything in
2 Essays in Experimental Logic, . 10 .
3 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 7.

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 dewey's theory of value. 341

its reality (as distinct from its "appearance," or phenomenal

occurrence) is what a knower would find it to be, is from
the immediatist's standpoint, if not the root of all philo
sophic evil, at least one of its main roots."4
While Dewey has carried the analysis of experience
somewhat into detail in the foregoing citation, we may rest,
for the purpose of this paper, in his usual dichotomy. If
we analyze the various aspects of our experience, we find
on the one side what Dewey refers to variously as "appre
ciation," "realization," "direct, non-cognitive doing-suf
fering," and on the other side what he refers to as "reflec
tion," "thinking," "cognition," "judgment." Experience, of
its own intrinsic nature, falls thus into a dualism?qualita
tive at least?and the nature and relation of these two parts
constitute both ethics and logic. Perhaps nowhere better
than in Democracy and Education has Dewey plainly set
over against each other these two aspects of experience.
"To value means primarily to prize, to esteem; but
secondarily it means to apprize, to estimate. It means, that
is, the act of cherishing something, holding it dear, and
also the act of passing judgment upon the nature and
amount of its value as compared with something else. To
value in the latter sense is to val?ate or evaluate. The dis
tinction coincides with that sometimes made between in
trinsic and instrumental values. Intrinsic values are not
objects of judgment, they cannot (as intrinsic) be com
pared, or regarded as greater and less, better or worse.
They are invaluable and if a thing is invaluable, it is neither
more nor less so than any other invaluable. But occasions
present themselves when it is necessary to choose, when
we must let one thing go in order to take another. This
establishes an order of preference, a greater and less, bet
ter and worse. Things judged or passed upon have to be
estimated in relation to some third thing, some further
4 Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 229.

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342 THE MONIST.

end. With respect to that they are means, or instrumen

tal values."5
From this quotation as a basis, Dewey's theory of value
may, I think, be fairly summarized in the four following
theses :

II
. Experience, which furnishes the context of all val
ues, is largely non-cognitive? It is well to emphasize this
non-cognitive basis of cognition itself ; for upon this plane
of experiencing lie most of the contents of our living. Here
are included our loves and our hates, our eating and our
sleeping, our friendships and our animosities, our illness
and our health ; here too are the fine arts ;7 here the dumb
gladness that welcomes the dawn, the quiet contemplation
of the sun's trailing glory at eventide, and the silent watch
ing of the passing night. This is the primal and ever the
larger aspect of human life. It is the good-in-itself, from
which reflection rises and for whose sake reflection exists
as an instrument.
2. Experience becomes cognitive only when incom
patibilities demand more than mere appreciation for their
successful resolution? Dewey is primarily interested in
intrinsic values, in the appreciative life described above.
Indeed, no living being, thinks he, ever becomes interested
in "extrinsic" value until he must in order to save and
extend some of the "intrinsic" content of his appreciative
life. Then judgment comes into play as an instrument
that is justified by resolving the difficulty back into a situa
Democracy and Education, p. 279.
6 "Experience is primarily an active-passive affair ; it is not primarily cog
nitive." Essays in Experimental Logic.
7 "For Dewev's feeling estimate of the place of art in life, see Reconstrue
tion in Philosophv, P. 212. Cf. Human Nature and Conduct, p. 159ff.
8 "Difficulties occasion thinking only when thinking is the imperative or
urgent way out. ..." Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 139. Cf. Democracy
and Education, p. 280.

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 dewey's theory of value. 343

tion that permits intrinsic goods again to become possible.

If judgment begins building upon itself a hierarchy that
forbids the energy of life to dip again into its stream, it
meets Nemesis upon its upward way, who robs it of its
vaunted glory and leaves it quite inane. "In fact, 'good'
is an empty term unless it includes satisfactions experi
enced."9
3. Such adjustment10 arises from, exists for the sake
of, and dips again into, non-cognitive experience. Think
ing becomes thus an instrument, but an indispensable in
strument, for the continuous preservation of the values for
which it exists.
4. Moral judgments do not discover value outside ex
perience, but reconstruct and create values within experi
ence. Let it be carefully borne in mind what has been said
about the genesis of judgments of all kinds. Value judg
ments are not unique, as Dewey thinks, save in that they
deal with a content that in direct experience was valuable.
Value judgments arise out of a situation made embarrass
ing by a conflict between two equally valuable parts of
experience or out of some other equally unsatisfactory turn
of experience ; and the judgments are but citations of what
seems necessary to make experience once more satisfac
tory. Judgments are?if one wishes to put it so?discov
eries of what, under the circumstances, one ought to do,
if he is successfully to resolve the unsatisfactory situation.
The judging process is not only the discovering of what is
to be done, but it is also the first step of the action itself.
It is not a discovery of something already existent (though
it has such as its data), because the situation to which the
judgment looks as an end that is to resolve the maladjust
ment, has never yet existed and would not come to exist
but for the process of action which is initiated by the judg
9 Democracy and Education, p. 412.
10 "It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of
something." Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 75. See also Ibid., p. 36.

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 344 THE MONIST.

ment itself.11 The restored equilibrium is the creation of

the active life through the judgment as its tool. "At what
ever risk of shock," thinks Dewey, "this doctrine should be
exposed in all its nakedness. To judge value is to engage
in instituting a determinate value where none is given.v>
The contention that judgments of value are practical in
cludes two points: "one, that the judgment of value is
never complete in itself, but always in behalf of determin
ing what is to be done ; the other, that judgments of value
(as distinct from the direct experience of something as
good) imply that value is not anything previously given,
but is something to be given by future action, itself con
ditioned upon (varying with) the judgment."13 For an
ill person to decide that it is well for him to see a doctor
is but for him to take the first step in the creation of the
good of his then situation, i. e., the seeing of the dortor,
a good that but for his judgment would never conic to
exist at all.
It is well for Dewey to insist upon the practical nature
of judgments of value: for if he can establish that fact,
he has not only added something to our understanding of
such judgments, but he has also in a way as effective as it
is indirect warded off from his general theory criticisms
from both idealists and realists. From both schools alike
have come charges of subjectivism against pragmatism.
Those who incline toward subjective idealism have wished
to claim Dewey; those who have espoused the cause of
objective idealism have joined with the realists in saying
that Dewey is a subjectivist. Only in so far as Dewey's
general theory of knowledge is involved in his theory of
value am I interested here in discussing his views on epis
temology. Dewey has elsewhere attempted to show that
those who, with Bertrand Russell, state the existence of
11 Essays in Experimental Logic, pp. 358-359.
12 Ibid., p. 368.
19 p. 361.

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 dewey's theory of value. 345
the world as a logical problem are but unconsciously chas
ing their own shadows ; for the very words in which they
are forced to state the problem show that they have already
answered the question in the affirmative before the ques
tion is put.14 But as regards the epistemological gulf in
the study of value, if it were true that there is such a thing
as the objective world and such a thing as the subjective
world, and the integrity of the subjective were determined
by its "correspondence" with the objective, then it were a
most serious charge against Dewey to say that he is a sub
jectivist. For in the field of value, it means that he pro
claims what could be hardly less serious than moral solips
ism. To both the idealist and the realist who feel that they
must have the objectivity of moral judgments before their
judgments can command respect, Dewey seems, if not him
self corrupt, at least a corrupter of youthful America.15
How, then, does Dewey escape the seriously meant
charge of denying the objectivity of value? He escapes
by pleading a change of venue, by denying the jurisdiction
of the court. "I can but think," says he, "that much of the
recent discussion of the objectivity of value and of value
judgments rests upon a false psychological theory. It rests
upon giving certain terms meanings that flow from an
introspective psychology which accepts a realm of purely
private states of consciousness. ... To refer value to
choice or desire, for example, is in that case to say that
value is subjectively conditioned. Quite otherwise, if we
have steered clear from such a psychology."16
Once granted that there is another way of approaching
the problem than the subjective-objective route; i. e., once
granted that not all experience involves the knowing rela
tion, one will have little difficulty in seeing that Dewey's
claim that value-judgments are practical, is an effective
"Logic, p. 281ff.
15 W. H. Sheldon, The Journal of Philosophy, 18:309-20.
16 Essays in Ex p. Logic, p. 364. See also Democracy and Education, p. 195.

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346 THE MONIST.

refutation to either the claim that they are subjective or the

claim that they are objective. Even though one himself
does not accept all that Dewey puts into his conclusions,
he must then admit, I think, that Dewey is at least con
sistent with himself. This robbing of the subjective-ob
jective problem of its meaning is by no means the least
thing for which students of value have to thank Dewey,
as I see it. So long as we did not see that value-judgments
arise out of a specific non-cognitive situation in need of
adjustment, that it is the first step in an action that seeks
to resolve the difficulty, and that it dips then to a non
reflective level where intrinsic goods are again possible?
so long did we wander from the meaning of concrete expe
riences and lose ourselves in the attempt to discover the
good, ?berhaupt.
This has been the besetting sin of philosophers begin
ning with and including Plato.17 But whether they have
been on the search for "the end, the summum bonum, the
final goal" or for inflexible standards with which to sound
conduct for "eternal values," they have uniformly re
turned empty-handed. The sufficient reason why they have
failed, says Dewey, is that "in the abstract or at large, there
is no such thing as degrees or order of value." "It is rea
sonable to believe," says he in another place, "that what
holds moral knowledge back is above all, the conception
that there are standards of good given to knowledge apart
from the work of reflection in construction of methods of
action."18 The reason for this faith on Dewey's part he
elsewhere indicates in these words : "Physical knowledge
did not as matter of fact advance till the dogma of models
or forms as standards of knowledge had been ousted. Yet
we hold tenaciously to a like doctrine in morals for fear of
moral chaos."19 Tust as the abolition of this noint of view
17 Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 50.
18 Logic, p. 382.
19 Ibid., p. 381.

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 dewey's theory of value. 347

in the natural sciences has led to such phenomenal widen

ing of the boundaries of our knowledge, even "in like
fashion," thinks Dewey, "we may anticipate that the aboli
tion of the final goal and the single motive power and the
separate and infallible faculty in morals, will quicken in
quiry into the diversity of specific goods of experience, fix
attention upon their conditions, and bring to light values
now dim and obscure."20 Renouncing, then, once for all
"the diversion of intelligence from discrimination of plural
and concrete goods . . . which has done more than brute
love of power to establish inequality and injustice among
men,"21 and leaving henceforth to "poetry and to art, the
task (so inartistically performed by philosophy since
Plato) of gathering together and rounding out, into one
abiding picture, the separate and special goods of life,"22
we shall "converge all the instrumentalities of the social
arts, of law, education, economics, and political science
upon the construction of intelligent methods of improving
the common lot."23

Ill
It is this ringing call for man to live in his own world
and this justification for his so doing, that constitutes the
essence of Dewey's philosophy. While others have cried
"lo, here; lo, there!" Dewey has continually insisted that
the kingdom of good is within human experience. It is dif
ficult to see why this course should need to be emphasized.
For other-wordliness is supposed to have passed with many
other anemic beauties of the mediaeval world. And this
is all that Dewey is really saying in his" theory of value :
values are immanent in human experience. Take them for
what they are: if they are many, so much the better; if
20 Darwin, p. 70.
21 Ibid., p. 75.
22 /?id., p. 71.
23 /Hdp. 69.

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348 THE MONIST.

they are found within classes that aforetime were vulgar,

judge the classes by the values, rather than the values by
the classes. When Dewey insists that values are here, he
also indicates the very important social doctrine that they
are everywhere here. No class has a monopoly upon them ;
if so, the chief task of man is to see that monopoly ended.
To make values common to all men, to deepen them, and to
guarantee them?this is the threefold problem common to
philosophy, to science, to government. This is the Prob
lem of Man. The first step in the solution of the problem
is the whole-hearted recognition that values are immanent
in human experience, rather than secluded in some tran
scendental or conceptual realm accessible to common men
only through priestly or philosophic or governmental inter
mediaries. It is this recognition that philosophers have
often failed consciously to make. I say "consciously," for
since all the values there are, are really in human experi
ence, it would not be marvelous if philosophers were
found, when off guard, to speak more wisely than when in
the cold ecstasy of philosophic sophistication. With this
hypothesis let us ramble a bit in the out-of-way preserves
of the two modern system-builders.
Of all moderns who have found human experience most
lacking, whether taken as a whole or by parts, F. H. Brad
ley perhaps comes first. His Appearance and Reality suc
ceeds so fatally well as practically to mean for man, as
Schiller facetiously suggested, the disappearance of real
ity. Begin where he will in the evaluation of human expe
rience, Bradley can find nothing that is not shot through
and through with inadequacies, contradictions, infinitude.
"Surely," he would say, "nothing here can be thought to
be finally valuable." It is only in the Absolute that value
can be found (though he even quibbles at predicating good
of the Absolute).24 Here, it would seem, is a complete
24 Appearance and Reality, p. 411.

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 dewey's theory of value. 349

antithesis to Dewey's theory of value ; for Dewey finds all

values in human experience, whereas Bradley finds none
possible in it. If human experience has any values at all,
they can appear as valuable only in the Absolute, never in
themselves. Here we see a traditionally recurring efifort
to belittle man's world carried through to its logical com
pletion. Man's world remains good only for its bads.
But the Absolute, in relation to which alone can any
thing else possess value, gets its value from its reconcil
ing nature. The Absolute seems the complete embodiment
of the seventh beatitude: in it all the contradictions of a
bedeviled world are set right. In it all questions cease
from troubling and all problems are at rest. But how is
this consummation (so devoutly to be wished!) attained?
It is attained by the abolition of thought ( relationally in
fected thought!) ; for the Absolute is not only trans-tem
poral, trans-spatial, but trans-rational as well.25 If solu
tion of contradictions is the great end that the Absolute
attains, then absence of reflection is the great means
through which the great end is reached.
At this stage, the question will inevitably arise: If
the solution of contradictions is the end to be sought, and
the means to its solution is the absence of thought, then
why go to such length to attain what is already present
at the outset? For unless the term "thought" be used in
such a double sense as really to destroy its meaning,
thought certainly does have its genesis in just the sort of
situation that Bradley thinks it attains only at the end.
The appreciative realm in which we daily live, move, and
have our being is, as such, non-reflective; and being non
rational, it has neither contradictions nor problems. These
do arise, but their birth means its death. We do not value
and evaluate the same object at the same time. Whether
one recognizes it or not, it is the deep concern with which
28 Appearance and Reality, p. 172.

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350 THE MONIST.

he views the interruption of his a-logical experiencing by

a hostile environment, a concern growing out of the un
speakably, the un-rationally profound significance this
mode of experiencing has for his life,?it is this concern,
I say, that leads to such persistent efforts, as Bradley's,
to think out the contradictions and restore the values. In
his description of the Absolute, Bradley has described with
vivid accuracy a genuine part, the most meaningful part,
of human experience. In a paradoxical epigram, half
playfully placed in the preface to his Appearance and Real
ity (an epigram apparently evolved in a moment of de
tached musing), Bradley has done more than in the entire
book that follows accurately to analyze human experience
and precisely to indicate the relations between its parts.
Says he: "To love unsatisfied the world is a mystery, a
mystery which love satisfied seems to comprehend."26 (Ital
ics mine.) Not even the incorrigibly intellectualistic sen
tence27 with which he closes the excerpt can obscure the
genuine significance that Bradley himself finds in imme
diate experience, such as is represented by "love." Indeed,
Bradley's epigram indicates in a sentence Dewey's own
theory of \^alue. Bradley's na?ve insight at the beginning
states, it seems to me, quite as intelligibly as does his much
belabored dialectic that follows for six hundred pages, the
nature of thought and reality and their relations to each
other. Since Bradley graciously leaves to the reader "how
seriously"28 he shall take that epigram, I for one have
long preferred to take it more seriously than I do the re
mainder of Appearance and Reality.
Another corroboration of Dewey's analysis and empha
sis that comes from quite as unexpected a source and comes,
even as in Bradley's case, from a moment of relaxation
26 Appearance and Reality, p. xv.
27 "The latter is wrong only because it cannot be content without think
ing itself right."
28 Appearance and Reality, p. xv.

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 dewey's theory of value. 351
rather than from a serious intellectual endeavor, is found
in a recent note of Bernard Bosanquet's.2* Bosanquet,
who through labored volumes loses human experience and
values in a conceptual Absolute at their close, Bosanquet,
whose "inmost aspiration"30 was, and is, to be able to say
to the "critics of Absolutism" : "Mark now, how a plain
tale shall put you down,"?even Bosanquet has here told
so plain a tale as to justify the feeling that the Absolute
may be brought down as effectively by its friend as by its
enemies. Bosanquet, surveying the Studio, feels an obvi
ous impatience with those who (following his own foot
steps) would push values out of human experience. "In
a world of supreme values, wholly beyond doubt," he
found himself saying, "What is the use of talking? Why
do we not look?" There before him, the great apostle of
the Absolute, were some pictures, "any one of them fit to
bring heaven into our time and place." In that moment of
insight, he confesses, "that the inexhaustibleness of values,
of human experience, is altogether beyond the need of rea
soning" and the thought left him, as he further confesses,
"a little indifferent to the precise remoter inferences which
we may draw from it, and a little impatient of any discus
sion which implies that we are not constantly in presence
of supreme realities and immeasurable values. (All italics
mine.) This "Undesigned Coincidence," as Bosanquet en
titles his brief note, furnishes further corroboration of the
theory of value enunciated in the earlier pages of this
paper. Undesigned these corroborations are, but perhaps
of greater weight because they are designed ; for they indi
cate an unbiased recognition of just such a state of reality
as Dewey's theory of value has so logically elaborated.
29 The Philosophical Review, 30:216.
80 The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. vi.

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352 THE MONIST.

IV
If one must have in every philosophy a metaphysics, I
wonder if we might not call Dewey's theory of value, his
metaphysics? This is suggested to me by the discovery
that Dewey is treating in his theory of immediate values
what those who have monopolized the term "metaphysics"
treat under that head. The Absolute is the metaphysical
object, par excellence; and Dewey also has his doctrine of
the absolute or of absolutes. Every act of thinking finds
its specific absolute in the restored immediate experience
to which the act is instrumental. Immediate experience is
absolute in the sense that it is the end of the problematic
situation, and as such is consequently "invaluable."81 Im
mediate experience enjoys the same surcease from the
exigencies of thinking as does Bradley's Absolute. It
seems to me that all the really distinctive and valuable at
tributes of the historical Absolute is preserved in Dewey's
absolute(s), for the doctrine of the Absolute (absolutists
to the contrary notwithstanding) has ever been an effort
to guarantee emotional satisfaction through the procedure
of rationalization. Dewey guarantees it, not by rationaliz
ing, but by recognizing it for what it is and setting about
with scientific foresight to make it permanent. In short,
Dewey has succeeded in showing how within human expe
rience itself, thought, instead of breeding vast contradic
tions through its relational nature, is, in the ascent of man,
the instrument evolved for the resolution of the difficulties

that arise on a lower level. Thought, precisely because it

is relational, is the one means through which the abso
lute (s), which we so much prize, may retain their absolute
ness ; i. e., may remain unproblematical.
81 See Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 175.

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 dewey's theory of value. 353

V
I wish now to return briefly to Dewey's own th
order to consider what seems to me the most sig
objection made to it, an objection raised curiously
not more by critics than by Dewey himself. Dew
ory of value, as we have seen, calls for a dichotom
experience; i. e., appreciation and reflection. But
actually exist, separated from each other, as t
sion seems to imply? However appreciative it
is not all experience judgmental, implicitly at lea
too easy to beg the question with the use of the t
plicit." That all experience, however purely appre
may (and does) become judgmental on occasion
both admits and affirms. Moreover, he explain
"the occasion." But if the critics should affirm
experience is actually judgmental, they would be
more than Dewey himself seems more than once to
With this admission one might still maintain t
two aspects?judgmental and appreciative?pred
in different situations, as Dewey himself affirms.
admit that all experiences are all the time actually
with more or less of the judgmental aspect, it see
that the distinction loses much of its significanc
still be justified as an explanatory device, but
longer be sharply descriptive of actual experie
lieving that the division is not only explanatory
rately descriptive of human experience as well,
feel that Dewey need make the admission (if the
quoted below and other similar ones constitute
sion.)38
32 "No experience having a meaning is possible without some element of
thought. But we may contrast two types of experience, according to the pro
portion of reflection found in them." {Democracy and Education, p. 169.)
38 "That something of the cognitive . . . enters in as a catalyzer ... in
even the most aesthetic experiences, seems to be altogether probable." (Loaic,
p. 394.)

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354 the monist.

The fact that one is always (during waking hours)

thinking, leads too easily to the conclusion that all our ex
periences are more or less thought experiences. True, of
course, that all our experiences are thought experiences
while they are being thought about. But the question
really is: Are all our experiences all the time being thought
about ? It seems clear to me that they are not, even to the
degree that Dewey thinks probable. Thinking is never
of things in general, never ?berhaupt. To the contrary,
thinking is always quite utterly specific, as Dewey has
repeatedly emphasized. Ignoring the apparent facts of
sleep (in which one may afterwards distinguish satisfac
tory or unsatisfactory rest, though he remember not so
much as a dream during the sleeping period), I should say
that, since thought is genuinely specific, one is always ex
periencing more than he is thinking about ; and this "more"
(though it may at any time through developing dishar
monies become the object of judgment) is for the time
being experienced only appreciatively.84 To use Dewey5 s
illustration, 1 may value my meal while evaluating the
argument of my friend ; or I may evaluate grit in my bread
while valuing the presence of my friend. It seems to me
that the two may not only be thought of as separate, but
that they are actually quite separate; i. e., that Dewey's
oft-repeated dichotomy does constitute a social and ethical
metaphysics.
T. V. Smith.
The University of Chicago.

84 It is, I think, because he does not clearly recognize this that Mr. Delton
Thomas Howard in Dewey's Logical Theory (Cornell Studies in Philosophy,
No. 11), is betrayed first into admitting that "it is doubtless true that men think
only occasionally and with some reluctance" (p. 124), later into the declaration
that "there is nothing in evidence to show that thinking is a special kind of
activity, which operates now and then" (p. 127), and finally into the distinc
tion that "the moment of real, earnest thinking is at the high tide of life, when
all the powers are awake and operating" (p. 132).

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