ABSTRACT
The restoration of intellectual self-respect that has taken place since 1945 has not in any simple way resulted from improvements in social status. The intellectual transformation began before a new social adjustment became apparent, and contributed to it. Wilkins with more sophistication in 1959, pointed out that John Dewey stated a theory of history much like that of the relativist historians; and that all of them slurred a necessary distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value. By the mid-195o's, McCarthyism was dead, and the big foundations were reacting nervously to outraged complaints that they had long neglected the humanities. Pragmatists had cheerfully trusted in the outcome of things to establish their truth or falsity. The progressive habit of grading intellectual activity according to its degree of contemporaneity diminished. The task of historiography would always require the utmost divestment of bias and the penetration of a realm beyond the immediate self and its immediate society.
