Sublime

Knowledge was to be acquired for its own sake. This was not careerism. For one thing, Johnson found it impossible to stick to any plan of study. ‘I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.’39 Rather, knowledge was sought for its ability to improve our character: ‘A man always makes himself greater as he increases his knowledge

Arthur Bostwick’s The American Public Library (4th edition; New York: Appleton, 1929) and Francis Drury’s Book Selection (Chicago: American Library Association, 1930).

Henry James

He would have been the first to disclaim that he had any special psychological insight. But he was the most intelligent of men, he had lived with his eyes open and read a lot, and he had obtained a good generalized sense of human nature—robust, indulgent, satirical, and utterly free from moral vanity. He was spiritually candid as few men are (I dou

Dewey’s disciple and successor in that post, William Kilpatrick, continued the tradition. Dewey’s protégé noted that schools should produce ‘better citizens, alert, able to think and act, too intelligently critical to be easily hoodwinked either by politicians or patent-medicines, self-reliant, ready of adaptation to the new social conditions that

Walden,

One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between education and democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form of government—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated experience’ (1916: 101). A good society was for Dewey an open society where people related on equal terms and all benefited

the central concept of morality is ‘the individual’ thought of as knowable by love,