Now it is because they have neglected to make this necessary separation that one party has been led to deny freedom and the other to define it, and thereby, involuntarily, to deny it too. They ask in fact whether the act could or could not be foreseen, the whole of its conditions being given; and whether they assert it or deny it, they admit that this totality of conditions could be conceived as given in advance: which amounts, as we have shown, to treating duration as a homogeneous thing and intensities as magnitudes. They will either say that the act is _determined_ by its conditions, without perceiving that they are playing on the double sense of the word causality, and that they are thus giving to duration at the same time two forms which are mutually exclusive. Or else they will appeal to the principle of the conservation of energy, without asking whether this principle is equally applicable to the moments of the external world, which are equivalent to one another, and to the moments of a living and conscious being, which acquire a richer and richer content. In whatever way, in a word, freedom is viewed, it cannot be denied except on condition of identifying time with space; it cannot be defined except on condition of demanding that space should adequately represent time; it cannot be argued about in one sense or the other except on condition of previously confusing succession and simultaneity. All determinism will thus be refuted by experience, but every attempt to define freedom will open the way to determinism. [Sidenote: This separation favourable to physical science, but against the interests of language and social life.] Inquiring then why this separation of duration and extensity, which science carries out so naturally in the external world, demands such an effort and rouses so much repugnance when it is a question of inner states, we were not long in perceiving the reason. The main object of science is to forecast and measure: now we cannot forecast physical phenomena except on condition that we assume that they do not _endure_ as we do; and, on the other hand, the only thing we are able to measure is space. Hence the breach here comes about of itself between quality and quantity, between true duration and pure extensity. But when we turn to our conscious states, we have everything to gain by keeping up the illusion through which we make them share in the reciprocal externality of outer things, because this distinctness, and at the same time this solidification, enables us to give them fixed names in spite of their instability, and distinct ones in spite of their interpenetration. It enables us to objectify them, to throw them out into the current of social life. [Sidenote: Hence two different selves: (1) the fundamental self; (2) its spatial and social representation: only the former is free.]