rmined.

The only power the organism possesses to control its own future depends
upon the way its present responses modify changes which are taking place
in its medium. A living being may be comparatively impotent, or
comparatively free. It is all a matter of the way in which its present
reactions to things influence the future reactions of things upon it.
Without regard to its wish or intent every act it performs makes some
difference in the environment. The change may be trivial as respects its
own career and fortune. But it may also be of incalculable importance;
it may import harm, destruction, or it may procure well-being.

Is it possible for a living being to increase its control of welfare and
success? Can it manage, in any degree, to assure its future? Or does the
amount of security depend wholly upon the accidents of the situation?
Can it learn? Can it gain ability to assure its future in the present?
These questions center attention upon the significance of reflective
intelligence in the process of experience. The extent of an agent's
capacity for inference, its power to use a given fact as a sign of
something not yet given, measures the extent of its ability
systematically to enlarge its control of the future.

A being which can use given and finished facts as signs of things to
come; which can take given things as evidences of absent things, can, in
that degree, forecast the future; it can form reasonable expectations.
It is capable of achieving ideas; it is possessed of intelligence. For
use of the given or finished to anticipate the consequence of processes
going on is precisely what is meant by "ideas," by "intelligence."

As we have already noted, the environment is rarely all of a kind in its
bearing upon organic welfare; its most whole-hearted support of
life-activities is precarious and temporary. Some environmental changes
are auspicious; others are menacing. The secret of success--that is, of
the greatest attainable success--is for the organic response to cast in
its lot with present auspicious changes to strengthen them and thus to
avert the consequences flowing from occurrences of ill-omen. Any
reaction is a venture; it involves risk. We always build better or worse
than we can foretell. But the organism's fateful intervention in the
course of events is blind, its choice is random, except as it can employ
what happens to it as a basis of inferring what is likely to happen
later. In the degree i