 As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through the transactions of organisms in natural environments. In general, creatures seek to satisfy needs and escape peril; when stability yields to precariousness, a struggle to reestablish balance begins; there is adjustment to self, to one’s environment, or both. Methods successful in the past, pre-organized responses, sometimes fail. In such cases, we become ambivalent—divided against ourselves about what to do next. It proves advantageous to inhibit practiced responses (to look before leaping); this pause or inhibition of the action flow creates a space which, Dewey wrote, “introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation” (EN, LW1: 237). In other words, inhibition creates ambivalence, and ambivalence makes possible new ways of considering alternatives; crude, physical situations take on qualitatively new complexities of meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote, sentiency or feeling 