Our second argument is one of fact. It consists in remembering that which in practice we understand by the subject of cognition; or rather, metaphorically we represent this subject to ourselves as an organ--the eye that sees or the hand that touches--and we represent to ourselves the relation subject-object in the shape of a material relation between two distinct bodies which are separated by an interval and between which some action is produced which unites them. Or else, confusing the subject and the Ego, which are nevertheless two different notions, we place the Ego in the consciousness of the muscular effort struggling against something which resists. Or, finally and still more frequently, we represent the subject to ourselves by confusing it with our own personality; it is a part of our biography, our name, our profession, our social status, our body, our past life foreshortened, our character, or, in a word, our civil personality, which becomes the subject of the relation subject-object. We artificially endow this personality with the faculty of having consciousness; and it results from this that the entity consciousness, so difficult to define and to imagine, profits by all this factitious addition and becomes a person, visible and even very large, in flesh and bone, distinct from the object of cognition, and capable of living a separate life. It is not difficult to explain that all this clearness in the representation of ideas is acquired by a falsification of the facts. So sensorial a representation of consciousness is very unfaithful; for our biography does not represent what we have called acts of consciousness, but a large slice of our past experience--that is to say, a synthesis of bygone sensations and images, a synthesis of objects of consciousness; therefore a complete confusion between the acts of consciousness and their objects. The formation of the personality seems to me to have, above all, a legal and social importance.[24] It is a peculiar grouping of states of consciousness imposed by our relations with other individuals. But, metaphysically, the subject thus understood is not distinguished from the object, and there is nothing to add to our distinction between the object and the act of consciousness. Those who defend the existence of the subject point out that this subject properly constitutes the Ego, and that the distinction of the subject and the object corresponds to the distinction of the Ego and non-Ego, and furnishes the separation between the physical and the moral so long sought.