PERIODICITY

We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiar

manifestations of it as Nature affords in _periodicity_. We recognize

it also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can be

co-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of the

wanderlust which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods that

go with waning day, and winter night. It is only when these recurrences

do not submit themselves to our puny powers of analysis and measurement

that we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return.

Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too,

may be but "a sleep and a forgetting." The reason that sleep fails to

terrify us as death does is because experience has taught that

_memory leafs the chasm_. Why should death bedreaded any more than

bedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. But do we really forget?

As Pierre Janet so tersely puts it, "Whatever has gone into the mind

may come out of the mind," and in a subsequent chapter this aphorism

will be shown to have extension in a direction of which the author of

it appears not to have been aware. Memory links night to night and

winter to winter, but such things as "the night-time of the spirit"

and "the winter of our discontent" are not recognized as having either

cause or consequence. Now though the well-springs of these states of

consciousness remain obscure, there is nothing unreasonable in

believing that they are recrudescences of far-off, forgotten moods

and moments; neither is it absurd to suppose that they may be related

to the movements and positions of the planets, as night and winter

are related to the axial and orbital movements of the earth.

But there are other, and even more interesting, evidences of time

curvature in consciousness. These lead away into new regions which

it is our pleasure now to explore.