² The theme is pervasive in Dewey’s writings, from the time of his early “The Reflex-Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896; reprinted in John Dewey: The Early Works 1882–1898, Jo Ann Boydston [ed.], Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, vol. 5, 97–110). Here are some representative passages from the late Experience and Nature (1925; reprinted in John Dewey: The Later Works 1925–1953, Jo Ann Boydston [ed], Southern Illinois University Press, 1981, vol. 1):

[By contrast to the traditional view:] Subjective and objective distinguished as factors in a regulated effort at modification of the environing world have an intelligible meaning. (p. 185)

We begin by noting that “experience” is what James called a double-barrelled word. Like its congeners, life and history, it includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine—in short, processes of experiencing. “Experience” denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed for; it also denotes the one who plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid him, who is downcast or triumphant. It is “double-barrelled” in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. “Thing” and “thought,” as James says in the same connection, are single-barrelled; they refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience. (p.19)

I still believe that on theoretical, as distinct from historical, grounds there is much to be said in favor of using “experience” to designate the inclusive subject-matter which characteristically “modern” (post-medieval) philosophy breaks up into the dualisms of subject and object, mind and the world, psychological and physical. (p. 362)

The value of experience for the philosopher is that it serves as a constant reminder of something which is neither exclusive and isolated subject or object, matter or mind, nor yet one plus the other. The fact of integration in life is a basic fact, and until its recognition becomes habitual, unconscious and pervasive, we need a word like experience to remind us of it, and to keep before thought the distortions that occur when the integration is ignored or denied. (p. 385)