| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: rolled over, he would have rolled right into the old woman's
garden, and frightened her out of her wits.
Then, when he had found a dark narrow crack, full of green-stalked
fern, such as hangs in the basket in the drawing-room, and had
crawled down through it, with knees and elbows, as he would down a
chimney, there was another grass slope, and another step, and so
on, till - oh, dear me! I wish it was all over; and so did he.
And yet he thought he could throw a stone into the old woman's
garden.
At last he came to a bank of beautiful shrubs; white-beam with its
great silver-backed leaves, and mountain-ash, and oak; and below
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: only by some unusual catastrophe, while for the origination of
new species something called an act of "special creation" was
necessary; and as to the nature of such extraordinary events
there was endless room for guesswork; but the discovery of
natural selection was the discovery of a process, going on
perpetually under our very eyes, which must inevitably of itself
extinguish some species and bring new ones into being. In these
and countless other ways we have learned that all the rich
variety of nature is pervaded by unity of action, such as we
might expect to find if nature is the manifestation of an
infinite God who is without variableness or shadow of turning,
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
