ABSTRACT
John Dewey was born before Lincoln was President and was fifty-five years old when the long peace of the nineteenth century collapsed into permanent war, revolution and tension. In the law and social thinking Dewey was faced by the principles of Social Darwinism and the doctrine of "natural rights" applied to the behavior of impersonal corporations. Dewey had a sense of the nuances of terms and a shrewd Yankee judgment about their ambiguities. Dewey repeatedly claimed that his ideas were supported by the logic of science and pleaded continually for the use of scientific method in all fields. But perhaps the greatest question raised by Dewey's theory of experience and culture, which is to say his notion of right experience and right culture, is the implicit value judgment that it involves. Dewey helped men to see that science meant something much more than an increase in their power to control their environment.
