SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
time in a laboratory—the idea!—measuring the speed of thought and dissecting brains. This young man in Michigan made bold to claim psychology as a natural science instead of a minor branch of metaphysics, and he did the best he could to prove it with such meager materials as were available at the time. His "Psychology" appeared, as should be remembered, three years before the epoch-making work of James and before any permanent psychological laboratory had been opened in the United States. In taking down again my battered brown copy of Dewey's "Psychology" I am surprised to find how trite and old-fashioned some of it sounds. Although Dewey thought he had thrown overboard all metaphysics it is evident that he was then carrying quite a cargo of it unconsciously.
But the commotion started by Dewey's "Psychology" was a tempest in an inkpot compared with the cyclone that swept over the country when he began to put his theories into practice at the University of Chicago in 1894. I heard echoes of it as far west as Wyoming. The teachers who went to the summer session of the University of Chicago came back shocked, fascinated, inspired, or appalled, according to their temperaments. The very idea of an "experimental school" was disconcerting, sug-
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