a way which may
influence what is still to happen. Sheer endurance, side-stepping
evasions, are, after all, ways of treating the environment with a view
to what such treatment will accomplish. Even if we shut ourselves up in
the most clam-like fashion, we are doing something; our passivity is an
active attitude, not an extinction of response. Just as there is no
assertive action, no aggressive attack upon things as they are, which is
all action, so there is no undergoing which is not on our part also a
going on and a going through.

Experience, in other words, is a matter of _simultaneous_ doings and
sufferings. Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of
events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves. This
duplicity of experience shows itself in our happiness and misery, our
successes and failures. Triumphs are dangerous when dwelt upon or lived
off from; successes use themselves up. Any achieved equilibrium of
adjustment with the environment is precarious because we cannot evenly
keep pace with changes in the environment. These are so opposed in
direction that we must choose. We must take the risk of casting in our
lot with one movement or the other. Nothing can eliminate all risk, all
adventure; the one thing doomed to failure is to try to keep even with
the whole environment at once--that is to say, to maintain the happy
moment when all things go our way.

The obstacles which confront us are stimuli to variation, to novel
response, and hence are occasions of progress. If a favor done us by the
environment conceals a threat, so its disfavor is a potential means of
hitherto unexperienced modes of success. To treat misery as anything but
misery, as for example a blessing in disguise or a necessary factor in
good, is disingenuous apologetics. But to say that the progress of the
race has been stimulated by ills undergone, and that men have been moved
by what they suffer to search out new and better courses of action is to
speak veraciously.

The preoccupation of experience with things which are coming (are now
coming, not just to come) is obvious to any one whose interest in
experience is empirical. Since we live forward; since we live in a world
where changes are going on whose issue means our weal or woe; since
every act of ours modifies these changes and hence is fraught with
promise, or charged with hostile energies--what should experience be but
a future implicated in a present! Adjustm