moment as I discuss with you I pronounce the word “discussion.” It is clear that my consciousness grasps this word altogether; if not it would not see it as a unique word and would not make sense of it. And yet when I pronounce the last syllable of the word the two first ones have already been pronounced; relatively to this one, which must then be called present, they are past. But this last syllable “sion” was not pronounced instantaneously; the time, however short, during which I was saying it, can be split up into parts and these parts are past, relatively to the last of them, and this last one would be present if it were not that it too can be further split up: so that, do what you will, you cannot draw any line of demarcation between past and present, and so between memory and consciousness. Indeed when I pronounce the word “discussion” I have before my mind, not only the beginning, the middle and the end of the word, but also the preceding words, also the whole of the sentence which I have already spoken; if it were not so I should have lost the thread of my speech. Now if the punctuation of the speech had been different my sentence might have begun earlier; it might, for instance, have contained the previous sentence and my “present” would have been still further extended into the past. Let us push this reasoning to its conclusion: let us suppose that my speech has lasted for years, since the first awakening of my consciousness, that it has consisted of a single sentence, and that my consciousness has been sufficiently detached from the future, sufficiently disinterested to occupy itself exclusively in taking in the meaning of the sentence: in that case I should not look for any explanation of the total conservation of this sentence any more than I look for one of the survival of the first two syllables of the word “discussion” when I pronounce the last one. Well, I think that our whole inner life is like a single sentence, begun from the first awakening of consciousness, a sentence scattered with commas, but nowhere broken by a full stop. And so I think that our whole past is there, subconscious—I mean present to us in such a way that our consciousness, to become aware of it, need not go outside itself nor add anything foreign: to perceive clearly all that it contains, or rather all that it is, it has only to put aside an obstacle, to lift a veil.”[5] [5] _L’Energie Spirituelle_—“L’Ame et le Corps,” pages 59 and 60.