| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons
change. Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare
sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow
here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and
hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that
forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of
England, these roads already disused when the Romans made
their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced
for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury
and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the
Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: room with a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut. The
atmosphere of the room was noxious beyond description; and the
effect was, that seven of the party were soon after seized with
typhus fever, of which two died. You are inflicting on yourselves
the torments of the poor dog, who is kept at the Grotto del Cane,
near Naples, to be stupefied, for the amusement of visitors, by
the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and brought to life again by
being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you are inflicting upon
yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole of Calcutta:
and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some fresh air
could enter, the candles would soon burn blue, as they do, you
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: how Dante, who says that 'sorrow remarries us to God,' could have
been so harsh to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any
such there really were. I had no idea that some day this would
become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.
While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one
desire. When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred
here, and found myself growing gradually better in physical health,
I was filled with rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very
day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed
away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king
wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I
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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 Statesman by Plato: indicated to Plato's own mind, as the corresponding theological problems
are to us. The immanence of things in the Ideas, or the partial separation
of them, and the self-motion of the supreme Idea, are probably the forms in
which he would have interpreted his own parable.
He touches upon another question of great interest--the consciousness of
evil--what in the Jewish Scriptures is called 'eating of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.' At the end of the narrative, the Eleatic asks
his companion whether this life of innocence, or that which men live at
present, is the better of the two. He wants to distinguish between the
mere animal life of innocence, the 'city of pigs,' as it is comically
termed by Glaucon in the Republic, and the higher life of reason and
Statesman |
