Dewey believed that early religion offered man an immediate, two-
story vision of the world. One level belonged to man, uncertainty,
and worldly objects; the other to perfection, essences, and certitude.
The world of perfection began to be seen as a different order from
that of everyday life, known only through rituals, magic, and through
priests endowed with other-worldly powers. The mechanics of daily
living were untrustworthy, mercurial, illusory, and thus hardly worth
knowing at all.

Although anthropological data would place this division later in
the development of religion, ³ Dewey has clearly read its significance.
Western philosophy, he said, inherited from religion "the idea of a
higher realm of fixed reality …and of an inferior world of changing
things with which experience and practical matters are concerned."
While philosophy substituted the rational for magic and ritual, it
directed attention not to the activities of man but to the search for
immutable and antecedent truth. Dewey explained that this merely
"translated into a rational form the doctrine of escape from the vicissi-
tudes of existence by means …which do not demand an active
coping with conditions. For deliverance by means of rites and cults, it
substituted deliverance through reason." Philosophical reason did not
directly confront human experience in an effort to clarify it: experi-
ence was not to be trusted. Reason sought a higher reality which, if
discovered, would clarify the totality of existence. The acceptance of a
two-vision world defined philosophy's task and determined its future.
The discipline was to concern itself with the "disclosure of the Real
in itself, of Being in and of itself." It became preoccupied "with a
higher and more ultimate form of Being than that with which the
sciences of nature are concerned." ⁴

Through centuries of philosophical thinking since antiquity, man
has continued to be wary of the changing and problematic. Like
other men, philosophers have been "impatient with doubt and sus-
pense" and have scurried away from it. ⁵ Necessity and science have
drawn philosophers closer to humanistic pursuits, but too frequently
they have taken pains not to confront the totality of human experience.
Armed with a talent for selective perception, philosophers have al-
lowed themselves to dissect experience, cutting away and discarding
the uncertain while maintaining that which appears to be stable.
For example, idealism ignored the actual process of thought which
renders the world meaningful through interaction and chose to equate
thought with 'reality' itself. By ignoring the ways in which man and

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