SOURCE: "George Herbert Mead," in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, Revised Edition, University of California Press, 1973, pp. 379-82.

In the following essay, which originally appeared in The New Republic in 1941, Burke offers a mixed review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century.

The publishers of these posthumous documents [Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century] print Whitehead's endorsement as follows: "I regard the publication of the volumes containing the late Professor George Herbert Mead's researches as of the highest importance for philosophy. I entirely agree with Professor John Dewey's estimate, 'A seminal mind of the very first order.'" The editors rank Mead, in the pragmatist movement, "as a thinker of the magnitude of Peirce, James and Dewey." And though the reader will probably feel that a philosophy is here mulled over, rather than formed, I cannot see why he should want to...