“Democracy is possible only because of a change in intellectual conditions. It implies tools for getting at truth in detail, and day by day, as we go along. Only such possession justifies the surrender of fixed, all-embracing principles to which, as universals, all particulars and individuals are subject for valuation and regulation. Without such possession, it is only the courage of the fool that would undertake the venture to which democracy has committed itself-the ordering of life in response to the needs of the moment in accordance with the ascertained truth of the moment. Modern life involves the deification of the here and the now; of the specific, the particular, the unique, that which happens once and has no measure of value save such as it brings with itself. Such deification is monstrous fetishism”
Dewey never really got over Hegel to fully embrace Darwin as an anthropologist of the contemporary might hope for but those of us writing after Nietzsche can now embrace what he couldn’t.
https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910b/Dewey_1910_10.html