h is in question, not the
play of our materialised habits.

Without insisting, then, too strongly on this mongrel conception, let
us pass to the direct examination of inner psychological reality.
Everything is ready for the conclusion. Our duration, which is
continually accumulating itself, and always introducing some irreducible
new factor, prevents any kind of state, even if superficially identical,
from repeating itself in depth. "We shall never again have the soul we
had this evening." Each of our moments remains essentially unique. It is
something new added to the surviving past; not only new, but unable to
be foreseen.

For how can we speak of foresight which is not simple conjecture, how
can we conceive an absolute extrinsic determination, when the act in
birth only makes one with the finished sum of its conditions, when these
conditions are complete only on the threshold of the action beginning,
including the fresh and irreducible contribution added by its very date
in our history? We can only explain afterwards, we can only foresee when
it is too late, in retrospect, when the accomplished action has fallen
into the plan of matter.

Thus our inner life is a work of enduring creation: of phases which
mature slowly, and conclude at long intervals the decisive moments of
emancipating discovery. Undoubtedly matter is there, under the forms of
habit, threatening us with automatism, seeking at every moment to devour
us, stealing a march on us whenever we forget. But matter represents in
us only the waste of existence, the mortal fall of weakened reality, the
swoon of the creative action falling back inert; while the depths of our
being still pulse with the liberty which, in its true function, employs
mechanism itself only as a means of action.

Now, does not this conception make a singular exception of us in
nature, an empire within an empire? That is the question we have yet to
investigate.

II.

We have just attempted to grasp what being is in ourselves; and we have
found that it is becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a creative
process which never ceases to labour incessantly; in a word, that it
is duration. Must we come to the same conclusion about external being,
about existence in general?

Let us consider that external reality which is nearest us, our body. It
is known to us both externally by our perceptions and internally by our
affections. It is then a privileged case for our inquiry. In ad