| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: time and all harnessed together and to the same rig.
I no longer jack-pole, and I don't mind admitting how I got out of
the habit. It was my eyes that enslaved my fingers into ill
practices. So I shut my eyes and let the fingers go it alone.
To-day my fingers are independent of my eyes and work
automatically. I do not see what my fingers do. They just do it.
All I see is the satisfactory result.
Still we managed to get over the ground that first day--down sunny
Sonoma Valley to the old town of Sonoma, founded by General
Vallejo as the remotest outpost on the northern frontier for the
purpose of holding back the Gentiles, as the wild Indians of those
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: may be remembered, and yet, when a new beginning is made, the old habit
soon returns, the neglected organs come back into use, and the river of
speech finds out the dried-up channel.
e. 'Consciousness' is the most treacherous word which is employed in the
study of the mind, for it is used in many senses, and has rarely, if ever,
been minutely analyzed. Like memory, it accompanies all mental operations,
but not always continuously, and it exists in various degrees. It may be
imperceptible or hardly perceptible: it may be the living sense that our
thoughts, actions, sufferings, are our own. It is a kind of attention
which we pay to ourselves, and is intermittent rather than continuous. Its
sphere has been exaggerated. It is sometimes said to assure us of our
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