from, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking the
forms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action,
and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs.


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