as a springboard, we jump out to a world of stable
things and other selves. But experience, taken free of the restrictions
imposed by the older concept, is full of inference. There is,
apparently, no conscious experience without inference; reflection is
native and constant.

These contrasts, with a consideration of the effect of substituting the
account of experience relevant to modern life for the inherited account,
afford the subject-matter of the following discussion.

Suppose we take seriously the contribution made to our idea of
experience by biology,--not that recent biological science discovered
the facts, but that it has so emphasized them that there is no longer an
excuse for ignoring them or treating them as negligible. Any account of
experience must now fit into the consideration that experiencing means
living; and that living goes on in and because of an environing medium,
not in a vacuum. Where there is experience, there is a living being.
Where there is life, there is a double connexion maintained with the
environment. In part, environmental energies constitute organic
functions; they enter into them. Life is not possible without such
direct support by the environment. But while all organic changes depend
upon the natural energies of the environment for their origination and
occurrence, the natural energies sometimes carry the organic functions
prosperously forward, and sometimes act counter to their continuance.
Growth and decay, health and disease, are alike continuous with
activities of the natural surroundings. The difference lies in the
bearing of what happens upon future life-activity. From the standpoint
of this future reference environmental incidents fall into groups: those
favorable to life-activities, and those hostile.

The successful activities of the organism, those within which
environmental assistance is incorporated, react upon the environment to
bring about modifications favorable to their own future. The human being
has upon his hands the problem of responding to what is going on around
him so that these changes will take one turn rather than another,
namely, that required by its own further functioning. While backed in
part by the environment, its life is anything but a peaceful exhalation
of environment. It is obliged to struggle--that is to say, to employ the
direct support given by the environment in order indirectly to effect
changes that would not otherwise occur. In this sense,