It may be said that otherness defends itself, but there is no agency in it, merely a correlative appearance based on subjective agency, which can be provisionally taken for granted. There are needs and propensities which give rise to actions purposive of improvement of satisfaction or conditions for satisfaction. Such actions are defined against a recalcitrant matter. The vast complexity of such matter with its pathways and intermediaries is both the consequence and the precondition of action as self-fulfillment. The perspective is that of mind in nature, and hence the distinction between these two facets is a shifting and merely relative one. No matter how strategically the distinction is deepened and reframed, no matter how much the integration is insisted upon, a sort of subject-object structure keeps reappearing, a division between an active, self-determining, sensitive and concerned pole and an indifferent, insentient, merely present pole whose matter of being is always entirely contingent.