| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: instead of dragging along over the ruts and dodging behind hedges--it
would be better to give way to the adorable passion that Jean-Jacques
Rousseau envied, to fall frankly in love with a girl like Isaure, with
a view to making her my wife, if upon exchange of sentiments our
hearts respond to each other; to be Werther, in short, with a happy
ending.'
" 'Which is a common weakness,' returned Rastignac without laughing.
'Possibly in your place I might plunge into the unspeakable delights
of that ascetic course; it possesses the merits of novelty and
originality, and it is not very expensive. Your Monna Lisa is sweet,
but inane as music for the ballet; I give you warning.'
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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 Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: apparatus and amuses the students by some long, learned
quotation, but the by no means complicated theory of the
circulation of the blood, for instance, is as much a mystery to
him now as it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my study, bending low over some book or
preparation, sits Pyotr Ignatyevitch, my demonstrator, a modest
and industrious but by no means clever man of five-and-thirty,
already bald and corpulent; he works from morning to night, reads
a lot, remembers well everything he has read -- and in that way
he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else he is a carthorse or,
in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse characteristics
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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 The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: And the superiors took to carousing and robbing by wholesale,
And the inferiors down to the lowest caroused and robb'd also.
Nobody thought of aught else than having enough for tomorrow.
Terrible was the distress, and daily increased the oppression.
None the cry understood, that they of the day were the masters.
Then even temperate minds were attack'd by sorrow and fury;
Each one reflected, and swore to avenge all the injuries suffer'd,
And to atone for the hitter loss of hopes twice defrauded.
Presently Fortune declared herself on the side of the Germans,
And the French were compell'd to retreat by forced marches before them.
Ah! the sad fate of the war we then for the first time experienced.
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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 Lesser Hippias by Plato: general considerations which equally affect all evidence to the genuineness
of ancient writings are the following: Shorter works are more likely to
have been forged, or to have received an erroneous designation, than longer
ones; and some kinds of composition, such as epistles or panegyrical
orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which
have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the
slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some
affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have
originated in a name or statement really occurring in some classical
author, are also of doubtful credit; while there is no instance of any
ancient writing proved to be a forgery, which combines excellence with
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