| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of you who understands me, and
he does NOT understand me.'
Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian
philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest about
it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology, maintains
not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by a mere crude
substitution of one word for another, but by showing either of them to be
the complement of the other. Both are creations of thought, and the
difference in kind which seems to divide them may also be regarded as a
difference of degree. One is to the other as the real to the ideal, and
both may be conceived together under the higher form of the notion. (ii)
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith: more words about it.
HARDCASTLE. There are a set of prints, too. What think you of the
Rake's Progress, for your own apartment?
MARLOW. Bring me your bill, I say; and I'll leave you and your
infernal house directly.
HARDCASTLE. Then there's a mahogany table that you may see your own
face in.
MARLOW. My bill, I say.
HARDCASTLE. I had forgot the great chair for your own particular
slumbers, after a hearty meal.
MARLOW. Zounds! bring me my bill, I say, and let's hear no more on't.
She Stoops to Conquer |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what
is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is
sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie,
he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians
won't do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar.
The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned
ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful. They can make the
worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from
Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant
juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even
when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and
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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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve,
do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of
truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes
hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.
The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased
with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next
day. But she should tell the children, she said, that there were
better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of
its convenience and the inconvenience of lying.
Yes, - I said, - but education always begins through the senses,
and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
