| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: their science, teaching me what I grew beyond twenty years ago!
To all their shouting and screaming I join the harlot in singing:
"I have known for seven years that horseshoe nails are iron."
So this can be the answer to your first question. Please do not
give these asses any other answer to their useless braying about
that word "sola" than simply "Luther will have it so, and he says
that he is a doctor above all the papal doctors." Let it remain
at that. I will, from now on, hold them in contempt, and have
already held them in contempt, as long as they are the kind of
people that they are - asses, I should say. And there are brazen
idiots among them who have never learned their own art of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: through a glass darkly, any more than he who contemplates actual effects.'
If the existence of ideas is granted to him, Socrates is of opinion that he
will then have no difficulty in proving the immortality of the soul. He
will only ask for a further admission:--that beauty is the cause of the
beautiful, greatness the cause of the great, smallness of the small, and so
on of other things. This is a safe and simple answer, which escapes the
contradictions of greater and less (greater by reason of that which is
smaller!), of addition and subtraction, and the other difficulties of
relation. These subtleties he is for leaving to wiser heads than his own;
he prefers to test ideas by the consistency of their consequences, and, if
asked to give an account of them, goes back to some higher idea or
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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 Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: before. And, because the blood which thus enters into the heart passes
through these two pouches called auricles, it thence happens that their
motion is the contrary of that of the heart, and that when it expands they
contract. But lest those who are ignorant of the force of mathematical
demonstrations and who are not accustomed to distinguish true reasons from
mere verisimilitudes, should venture. without examination, to deny what
has been said, I wish it to be considered that the motion which I have now
explained follows as necessarily from the very arrangement of the parts,
which may be observed in the heart by the eye alone, and from the heat
which may be felt with the fingers, and from the nature of the blood as
learned from experience, as does the motion of a clock from the power, the
Reason Discourse |
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 Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: * * *
* *
*
The next day was the day for Sister Helen Vincula and Bessie Bell to
leave the high, cool mountain. They were to leave the little cabin
where the lady had told them to live until they had gotten well
again.
So when their leaving day came Sister Helen Vincula put a clean
stiff-starched blue-checked apron on Bessie Bell, and they walked
together to the Mall where the band was playing.
Bessie Bell was always so glad when Sister Helen Vincula took her to
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