results of the spent day into consciousness,
lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the
gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past.
Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all of
which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over,
that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or
bitterly. Evening is the time for this.

But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for passion.
Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflames
into life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by a
process of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived,
by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation,
consciousness, energy and passion, and live it out. It is a liberation
from the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of control
and fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturally
the course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction:
sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deeper
sensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual.

The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form of
retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct
from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical
consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most
elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of
_dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness is
blood-consciousness.

And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When the
blood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first the
lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to the
great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral
ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep
swaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form of
consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure
blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the
nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the
consciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep.

The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living
soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with
its first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate
purely unti