our life when we made some serious decision, moments unique of their kind, which will never be repeated--**any more than the past phases in the history of a nation will ever come back again. We should see that if these past states cannot be adequately expressed in words or artificially reconstructed by a juxtaposition of simpler states, it is because in their dynamic unity and wholly qualitative multiplicity they are phases of our real and concrete duration, a heterogeneous duration and a living one. We should see that, if our action was pronounced by us to be free, it is because the relation of this action to the state from which it issued could not be expressed by a law, this psychic state being unique of its kind and unable ever to occur again. We should see, finally, that the very idea of necessary determination here loses every shred of meaning, that there cannot be any question either of foreseeing the act before it is performed or of reasoning about the possibility of the contrary action once the deed is done, for to have all the conditions given is, in concrete duration, to place oneself at the very moment of the act and not to foresee it. But we should also understand the illusion which makes the one party think that they are compelled to deny freedom, and the others that they must define it. It is because the transition is made by imperceptible steps from concrete duration, whose elements permeate one another, to symbolical duration, whose moments are set side by side, and consequently from free activity to conscious automatism. It is because, although we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, it seldom happens that we are willing. It is because, finally, even in the cases where the action is freely performed, we cannot reason about it without setting out its conditions externally to one another, therefore in space and no longer in pure duration. The problem of freedom has thus sprung from a misunderstanding: it has been to the moderns what the paradoxes of the Eleatics were to the ancients, and, like these paradoxes, it has its origin in the illusion through which we confuse succession and simultaneity, duration and extensity, quality and quantity. [1] On this point see Lange, _History of Materialism,_ Vol. ii, Part ii. [2] Cf. _Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy._5th ed., (1878), p. 583. [3] _Ibid._ p. 585. [4] _Ibid._ p. 585. [5] _The Emotions and the Will,_ Chap. vi. [6] Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme._ [7] In Molière's comedy _Le Misanthrope, (Tr.)_. [8] _Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy._ 5th ed., (1878), p. 580. [9] _Ibid._ p. 583.