 Though many years later Dewey attributed important credit to Peirce’s pragmatism for his mature views, during graduate school, Peirce had no sizable impact. Dewey’s main graduate school influences—Neo-Hegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and Wundtian experimental psychology—created a tension, which he sought to resolve. Was the world fundamentally biological, functional, and material or was it, rather, inherently creative and spiritual? In no small part, Dewey’s career was launched by his attempt to mediate and harmonize these views. While they shared the idea of “organism”, Dewey also saw in both —- and rejected—any aspects deemed overly abstract, atomizing, or reductionistic. His earliest attempts to create a “new psychology” (aimed at merging experimental psychology with idealism) sought a method by which experience could be understood as integrated and whole. As a result, Dewey’s early approach was a modified, English absolute idealism. Two years after matriculating, Dewey completed graduate school in 1884 with a dissertation criticizing Kant from an Idealist position (“The Psychology of Kant”); it remains lost.