This volume republishes forty-four essays, reviews, and miscellaneous pieces from 1939, 1940, and 1941.

In his Introduction, R. W. Sleeper characterizes the contents of this volume as "vintage Dewey. Ranging widely over problems of theory and practice, they reveal him commencing his ninth decade at the peak of his intellectual powers."

"Nature in Experience," Dewey's reply to Morris R. Cohen and William Ernest Hocking, "is a model of clarity and responsiveness," writes Sleeper, "perhaps his clearest statement of why it is that metaphysics does not play the fundamental role for him that it had regularly played for his predecessors."