| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: Keola edged her up little by little, and kept all drawing. And
presently the land was close on board, and the sound of the sea on
the sides of it grew loud.
With that, the mate sat up suddenly upon the house.
"What are you doing?" he roars. "You'll have the ship ashore!"
And he made one bound for Keola, and Keola made another clean over
the rail and plump into the starry sea. When he came up again, the
schooner had payed off on her true course, and the mate stood by
the wheel himself, and Keola heard him cursing. The sea was smooth
under the lee of the island; it was warm besides, and Keola had his
sailor's knife, so he had no fear of sharks. A little way before
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: girl a passion of childish vanity, self-love IN EXCELSIS, and no more.
It is to be understood that I have been painting chaos and describing
the inarticulate. Every lineament that appears is too precise, almost
every word used too strong. Take a finger-post in the mountains on a
day of rolling mists; I have but copied the names that appear upon the
pointers, the names of definite and famous cities far distant, and now
perhaps basking in sunshine; but Christina remained all these hours, as
it were, at the foot of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in
mutable and blinding wreaths of haze.
The day was growing late and the sunbeams long and level, when she sat
suddenly up, and wrapped in its handkerchief and put by that psalm-book
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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 Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom
of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along.
This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never let
go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu didn't
understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just this moment
become clear to myself.
"Many of us," I began, "who have watched the soiling touch of politics
make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated
to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world to
sing its songs and draw its pensions."
She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she
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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 Parmenides by Plato: described has no real existence. The mind, after having obtained a general
idea, does not really go on to form another which includes that, and all
the individuals contained under it, and another and another without end.
The difficulty belongs in fact to the Megarian age of philosophy, and is
due to their illogical logic, and to the general ignorance of the ancients
respecting the part played by language in the process of thought. No such
perplexity could ever trouble a modern metaphysician, any more than the
fallacy of 'calvus' or 'acervus,' or of 'Achilles and the tortoise.' These
'surds' of metaphysics ought to occasion no more difficulty in speculation
than a perpetually recurring fraction in arithmetic.
It is otherwise with the objection which follows: How are we to bridge the
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