But admitting that environment is made what it is by the powers and aims of the agent, what sense shall we attribute to the term adjustment? Not bare conformity to circumstances, nor bare external reproduction of them, even when circumstances are taken in their proper moral meaning. The child in the family who simply adjusts himself _to_ his relationships in the family, may be living a moral life only in outward seeming. The citizen of the state may transgress no laws of the state, he may punctiliously fulfill every contract, and yet be a selfish man. True adjustment must consist in _willing_ the maintenance and development of moral surroundings as _one's own end_. The child must take the spirit of the family into himself and live out this spirit according to his special membership in the family. So a soldier in the army, a friend in a mutual association, etc. Adjustment to intellectual environment is not mere conformity of ideas to facts. It is the living assimilation of these facts into one's own intellectual life, and maintaining and asserting them as _truth_.
There are environments existing prior to the activities of any individual agent; the family, for example, is prior to the moral activity of a child born into it, but the point is to see that 'adjustment', to have a moral sense, means _making the environment a reality for one's self_. A true description of the case would say that the child takes for his own end, ends already existing for the wills of others. And, in making them his own, he creates and supports for himself an environment that already exists for others. In such cases there is no special transformation of the existing environment; there is simply the process of making it the environment for one's self. So in learning, the child simply appropriates to himself the intellectual environment already in existence for others. But in the activity of the man of science there is more than such personal reproduction and creation; there is increase, or even reconstruction of the prior environment. While the ordinary citizen hardly does more than make his own the environment of ends and interests already sustained in the wills of others, the moral reformer may remake the whole. But whether one case or the other, adjustment is not outer conformity; it is living realization of certain relations in and through the will of the agent.