  Dewey’s earliest philosophical work was deeply influenced by the Idealism imbibed from his teacher and colleague George S. Morris. Through the 1890s, and particularly after a move to the newly founded University of Chicago in 1894, Dewey began a steady drift away from Idealist metaphysics, a process that he describes in an autobiographical essay “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”. Influenced notably by William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), Dewey came to repudiate both the Idealist’s claim that the study of empirical phenomena leads to the conclusion that the world is mind, and the belief that the only alternative to this is an atomistic empiricism. Yet he retained the Idealist ambition of articulating a unified account of human progress.  While at Chicago Dewey’s interest in educational theory and conception of the school as a central institution for a democratic society came to fruition, in the foundation of the University Elementary School (the “Lab School”), and in books such as The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), and later in the culminating statement Democracy and Education (1916). After a dispute with the university president, Dewey left Chicago in 1904 for Columbia University, where he remained until his retirement. 