and mysteriously
interesting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakened
in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to
contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is
not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but
because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the
Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that
clutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises:
it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is
turning toward the Idea of Pain.

Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek
in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines
circumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The
organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations
in higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an
object draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only a
figure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application.
Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recede
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