| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: and if he try to persuade others to investigate those sciences in a manner
contrary to the law, he shall be punished with the utmost severity. And
like rules might be extended to any art or science. But what would be the
consequence?
'The arts would utterly perish, and human life, which is bad enough
already, would become intolerable.'
But suppose, once more, that we were to appoint some one as the guardian of
the law, who was both ignorant and interested, and who perverted the law:
would not this be a still worse evil than the other? 'Certainly.' For the
laws are based on some experience and wisdom. Hence the wiser course is,
that they should be observed, although this is not the best thing of all,
Statesman |
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 Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect;
and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of
personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of
free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of
road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we
write, some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious
aesthetic artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of
country. It is said that the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty
in his mind as he laid them down. And the result is striking. One
splendid satisfying sweep passes with easy transition into another,
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