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?