| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: associations of mythology and poetry have to be added, and the unconscious
influence of science has to be subtracted, before we can behold the heavens
or the earth as they appeared to the Greek. The philosopher himself was a
child and also a man--a child in the range of his attainments, but also a
great intelligence having an insight into nature, and often anticipations
of the truth. He was full of original thoughts, and yet liable to be
imposed upon by the most obvious fallacies. He occasionally confused
numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers; his a priori notions were out
of all proportion to his experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena
of the heavens by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments
which nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried
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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 The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: perpetual enjoyment, which turned her head. She was daring
enough in conversation; she would listen to anything, corrupting
the surface, as it were, of her heart. Yet when she returned
home, she often blushed at the story that had made her laugh; at
the scandalous tale that supplied the details, on the strength of
which she analysed the love that she had never known, and marked
the subtle distinctions of modern passion, not with comment on
the part of complacent hypocrites. For women know how to say
everything among themselves, and more of them are ruined by each
other than corrupted by men.
There came a moment when she discerned that not until a woman is
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