life goes on by
means of controlling the environment. Its activities must change the
changes going on around it; they must neutralize hostile occurrences;
they must transform neutral events into cooeperative factors or into an
efflorescence of new features.

Dialectic developments of the notion of self-preservation, of the
_conatus essendi_, often ignore all the important facts of the actual
process. They argue as if self-control, self-development, went on
directly as a sort of unrolling push from within. But life endures only
in virtue of the support of the environment. And since the environment
is only incompletely enlisted in our behalf, self-preservation--or
self-realization or whatever--is always indirect--always an affair of
the way in which our present activities affect the direction taken by
independent changes in the surroundings. Hindrances must be turned into
means.

We are also given to playing loose with the conception of adjustment, as
if that meant something fixed--a kind of accommodation once for all
(ideally at least) of the organism _to_ an environment. But as life
requires the fitness of the environment to the organic functions,
adjustment to the environment means not passive acceptance of the
latter, but acting so that the environing changes take a certain turn.
The "higher" the type of life, the more adjustment takes the form of an
adjusting of the factors of the environment to one another in the
interest of life; the less the significance of living, the more it
becomes an adjustment to a given environment till at the lower end of
the scale the differences between living and the non-living disappear.

These statements are of an external kind. They are about the conditions
of experience, rather than about experiencing itself. But assuredly
experience as it concretely takes place bears out the statements.
Experience is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing
something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense
of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo, the
consequences of its own actions. Experience is no slipping along in a
path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an
incidental outcome of experience of a vital objective sort; it is not
its source. Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. The most
patient patient is more than a receptor. He is also an agent--a reactor,
one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing in