When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows.
 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). copy citation

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Author John Dewey
Source Democracy and Education
Topic quality connection
Date 1916
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm

Context

“The intellectual variations of the individual in observation, imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the agencies of social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of social conservation. But when knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied. When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else.” source