For ideas belong to human beings who have bodies, and there is no separation between the structures and processes of the part of the body that entertains the ideas and the part that performs acts.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
Brain and muscles work together, and the brains of men are much more important data for social science than are their muscular system and their sense organs.
The concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by “The,” is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use.
The moment we utter the words “The State” a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision.
Without our intention and without our notice, the notion of “The State” draws us imperceptibly into a consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and away from facts of human activity.
It is better, if possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby into an idea of something which will turn out to implicate the marks and signs which characterize political behavior.
But very much depends upon what we select from which to start and very much depends upon whether we select our point of departure in order to tell at the terminus what the state ought to be or what it is.
If we are too concerned with the former, there is a likelihood that we shall unwittingly have doctored the facts selected in order to come out at a predetermined point.
To explain the origin of the state by saying that man is a political animal is to travel in a verbal circle.
It is like attributing religion to a religious instinct, the family to marital and parental affection, and language to a natural endowment which impels men to speech.
Such theories merely reduplicate in a so-called causal force the effects to be accounted for.
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.