| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis: a lot of niggers his nigger blood would get the best
of him, and what he preached wasn't white su-
premacy at all, but hopefulness of being equal.
So the whites had fell away from him, and then
his graft was gone, and then his brains turned sour
in his head and got to working and fermenting in it
like cider getting hard, and he made a few bad
breaks by not being careful what he said before
white people. But the niggers liked him all the
better fur that.
They always had been more or less hell in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: that the door was open, and I went in, seeing the goods lie
there, and with design to buy. If, seeing nobody in the house, I
had taken any of them up in my hand it could not be concluded
that I intended to steal them, for that I never carried them
farther than the door to look on them with the better light.
The Court would not allow that by any means, and made a
kind of a jest of my intending to buy the goods, that being no
shop for the selling of anything, and as to carrying them to the
door to look at them, the maids made their impudent mocks
upon that, and spent their wit upon it very much; told the
Court I had looked at them sufficiently, and approved them
Moll Flanders |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: and different theory, of those who assert that knowledge first begins with
a proposition.
The elements may be perceived by sense, but they are names, and cannot be
defined. When we assign to them some predicate, they first begin to have a
meaning (onomaton sumploke logou ousia). This seems equivalent to saying,
that the individuals of sense become the subject of knowledge when they are
regarded as they are in nature in relation to other individuals.
Yet we feel a difficulty in following this new hypothesis. For must not
opinion be equally expressed in a proposition? The difference between true
and false opinion is not the difference between the particular and the
universal, but between the true universal and the false. Thought may be as
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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 Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: have yet a being.
Gentlemen, I might both enlarge and lose myself in such like
arguments. I might tell you that Almighty God is said to have spoken to
a fish, but never to a beast; that he hath made a whale a ship, to carry
and set his prophet, Jonah, safe on the appointed shore. Of these I might
speak, but I must in manners break off, for I see Theobald's House. I cry
you mercy for being so long, and thank you for your patience.
Auceps. Sir, my pardon is easily granted you: I except against nothing
that you have said: nevertheless, I must part with you at this park-wall,
for which I am very sorry; but I assure you, Mr. Piscator, I now part
with you full of good thoughts, not only of yourself, but your recreation.
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