 Dewey was in his seventies when Art as Experience was published, but also his earlier work contains numerous discussions of aesthetic related themes, beginning already from his very first book, Psychology (1887), in which Dewey discusses aesthetics and the arts at various points. Dewey, for example, emphasizes the importance of rhythm to our psychic lives, both in perception and in expression. The soul tends to express its most intimate states, especially emotion, in rhythmic form. Rhythm is defined as the mind’s reduction of variety to unity or its breaking unity into variety. It happens when certain beats are emphasized at regular intervals, and it requires that elements be organized temporally, through the mind being carried back and forth, to form a whole. It is not confined to the arts but is pervasive in our experience of time.