Now a mad individual can be locked up and forgotten. Occasionally, however, an impulse of atavism seizes on a whole mass of people; too many to be either locked up or ignored. Such a mass, ignorant of ancestral history, and, therefore, not knowing to what their own sensations point, start some weird fantastic movement, related to some portion of ancestral history much as a dream is related to the past experience of the dreamer. Such movements are produced by some stratum of the ancestral past forcing itself into the consciousness of an irreverent and forgetful posterity. A nation lives long in the land which is careful to study its past; partly because such a Nation reverences the spontaneous Revelations of heredity; and does not allow priests and school-masters to trample out its instincts; and, there-fore, does not go mad of atavism repressed till it becomes phrensy.
CHAPTER XIII
THE REDEMPTION OF EVIL
"The Bow shall be a Token."
A trifling but interesting confirmation of the Pulsation-doctrine is to be found in a singular fact connected with Art-Needlework.
Nervous disorder, at least in its beginnings, has polar or antithetic phases. A fit of excitement is followed by one of depression, etc. These aberrant moods affect, in some degree, the colour-sense. Let any patient, who has a sensitive retina but no knowledge of Art, try the following experiment:—
