A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey

At the White Street Congregational Church, Lewis Barstow preached a liberal orthodoxy that was essentially "man-building" (102), and Good presents a convincing case for the likelihood that even in boyhood Dewey never viewed God as an aloof lawgiver or cosmic architect, but as a process unifying the individual and the social within a natural world of unlimited potential. The point is simply that Dewey dropped his lure in a number of different streams, and among those of note should also include Bain's link between action and knowledge, Coleridge's social theology, Berkeley's and Locke's recognition of the sign-function of sense, the more than terminological debt owed to Peirce, James, and George Herbert Mead, and even the curious fact that Plato provided Dewey's favorite philosophical reading.