| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction
in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts
were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--
all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered
from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war,
insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--
seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation.
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather
than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather
than let it perish. And the war came.
Second Inaugural Address |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: have worked me night and day in degraded employments, and beaten
me; they have fed me ill, and some days not at all. And so I am
but bones, now, with a rough and frowsy skin humped and cornered
upon my shrunken body - that skin which was once so glossy, that
skin which she loved to stroke with her hand. I was the pride of
the mountains and the Great Plains; now I am a scarecrow and
despised. These piteous wrecks that are my comrades here say we
have reached the bottom of the scale, the final humiliation; they
say that when a horse is no longer worth the weeds and discarded
rubbish they feed to him, they sell him to the bull-ring for a
glass of brandy, to make sport for the people and perish for their
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: that there are upland geese with webbed feet, ground woodpeckers, diving
thrushes, and petrels with the habits of auks.
Although the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been
formed by natural selection, is more than enough to stagger any one; yet in
the case of any organ, if we know of a long series of gradations in
complexity, each good for its possessor, then, under changing conditions of
life, there is no logical impossibility in the acquirement of any
conceivable degree of perfection through natural selection. In the cases
in which we know of no intermediate or transitional states, we should be
very cautious in concluding that none could have existed, for the
homologies of many organs and their intermediate states show that wonderful
On the Origin of Species |
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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying
gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its
plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell
on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the
long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny
aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to
whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the
petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my
boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice
of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle
sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.
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