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FROM WINTER TO AUTUMN: If, in maintaining our established terminology, we are in accord that winter is the negative season of the year and summer, by contrast, the positive one, then I deem spring to be the negative-positive and autumn the positive-negative. Hence we find the seasons following the sequence: negative, negative-positive, positive, positive-negative, with the two divisible seasons, viz. spring and autumn, progressing to their respective consummations in summer and winter. Since the positive always arises from the negative, we find its earliest manifestation in spring, its consummation in summer, and its gradual decline in autumn; the winter, or root season, being the eternal negative from which the process of growth and decay must again proceed.

Strictly speaking, however, there are only two (not four) divisions to the year, viz. winter and summer, in accordance with the fundamental dualism underlining the activity of all life on this planet, the transitional periods, as it were, of spring and autumn being an inceptive extension of summer and winter respectively, and granting us a useful analogy with the half-light states before dawn and after sunset, which we term twilight.