Dewey's father had little formal education but was an avid reader of the works of John Milton and William Shakespeare; during the Civil War he served with the Union army as a quartermaster. Dewey was a bashful, bookish boy who loved hiking in the Adirondacks and boating on the nearby lakes and in Quebec.
While attending the University of Vermont, Dewey was caught up by the controversy over the theory of evolution and the questions it raised about the relationship between science and society; he was particularly impressed by Thomas Henry Huxley's textbook Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1866). He was also influenced by the American afterglow of German Romanticism, the Transcendentalist movement--in particular, by James Marsh's critical American edition (1829) of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion (1825), which he later recalled as his spiritual emancipation. The effort to synthesize the biological concept of the organism with the organic thinking of German idealism drove Dewey into philosophy and determined the development of his thinking. During his last year in college he attended H.
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