That pragmatism should arise in America is not so surprising, not surprising at all in fact. The mechanical and materialist doctrines of Hegel, Laplace, Malthus, Marx, Darwin and Spencer were essentially deterministic whereas for James and Dewey the universe–very much like America–was still in progress, still in the making, ‘a place where no conclusion is foregone and every problem is amenable to the exercise of what Dewey called intelligent action’. Above all, he felt that–like everything else–ethics evolve. This was a sharp deduction from Darwin, quickly reached and still not often enough
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