All our lives long, every day and very hour, we are engaged in the
process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed
and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, is nothing else than this
process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid,
when we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it temporarily
we sleep, when we give up the attempt altogether we die. In quiet,
uneventful lives the changes internal and external are so small that
there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and
accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also
great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with
little accommodating power. A life will be successful or not according
as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain
of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.
The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity
of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is
either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as
external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object
-external and internal -being unified as much as everything else.
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