This “eternal return,” so far from being a new idea, is so old that it has been forgotten.  Its reappearance in novel guise, along with so many other recrudescences, itself beautifully illustrates time curvature in consciousness. Yugas, time cycles, are an integral and inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics.  “Since the soul perpetually runs,” says Zoroaster, “in a certain space of time it passes through all things, which circulation being accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world.”  Time curvature is implicit in the Greek idea of the iron, bronze, silver, and golden ages, succeeding each other in the same order:  the winter, seed-time, summer and harvest of the larger year.  Astrology, seership, prophecy, become plausible on the higher-time hypothesis.  From this point of view history becomes less puzzling and paradoxical.  What were the Middle Ages but a forgetting of Greek and Roman civilization, and what was the Renaissance but a remembering of them—­a striving to re-create the ruined stage-settings and to re-enact the urbane play of Pagan life.  The spirit of the Crusades is now again animate throughout Europe.  Nations are uniting in a Holy War against the Infidel de nos jours.

But it is in the individual consciousness that time curvature receives its most striking confirmation—­those lesser returns and rhythms to which we give the name of periodicity.  Before considering these, however, a fundamental fallacy of the modern mind must be exposed.

MATERIALITY THE MIRROR OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything—­even thought and emotion—­in materiality, has betrayed us into the error of attributing to organic and environic changes the very power by which they are produced.  We are wont to think of feeling, the form in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of as a cause.  When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly 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.