| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: Or do you think that Orestes, had he been in his senses and knew what was
best for him to do, would ever have dared to venture on such a crime?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: Nor would any one else, I fancy?
ALCIBIADES: No.
SOCRATES: That ignorance is bad then, it would appear, which is of the
best and does not know what is best?
ALCIBIADES: So I think, at least.
SOCRATES: And both to the person who is ignorant and everybody else?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: Let us take another case. Suppose that you were suddenly to get
|
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: room. The main army was on the other side of Moscow or beyond it.
At that very time, at ten in the morning of the second of September,
Napoleon was standing among his troops on the Poklonny Hill looking at
the panorama spread out before him. From the twenty-sixth of August to
the second of September, that is from the battle of Borodino to the
entry of the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating,
memorable week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that
always comes as a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat
than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear
atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and
refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air, when even the nights
War and Peace |
