Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
Interpretation
Human reasoning often defies logic, clinging to old beliefs despite a lack of rational support.
This quote by John Dewey highlights the paradox of human reasoning, emphasizing that individuals often cling to their longstanding beliefs and reservations even when evidence or logic suggest otherwise. It illustrates how the history of human thought is not a straightforward trajectory of rational evolution but rather a complex interplay of compromise and emotional attachment to certain ideas.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of belief and reason.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
Each of us lives within the universe - the prison - of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us: heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?
Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.
Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.
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