| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: Such a science might have two legitimate fields: first, the refutation and
explanation of false philosophies still hovering in the air as they appear
from the point of view of later experience or are comprehended in the
history of the human mind, as in a larger horizon: secondly, it might
furnish new forms of thought more adequate to the expression of all the
diversities and oppositions of knowledge which have grown up in these
latter days; it might also suggest new methods of enquiry derived from the
comparison of the sciences. Few will deny that the introduction of the
words 'subject' and 'object' and the Hegelian reconciliation of opposites
have been 'most gracious aids' to psychology, or that the methods of Bacon
and Mill have shed a light far and wide on the realms of knowledge. These
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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 Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: holies can perceive its errors. But you are worthy of a lesson, and
capable of understanding it. I will show you how little is needed to
turn that picture into a true masterpiece. Give all your eyes and all
your attention; such a chance of instruction may never fall in your
way again. Your palette, Porbus."
Porbus fetched his palette and brushes. The little old man turned up
his cuffs with convulsive haste, slipped his thumb through the palette
charged with prismatic colors, and snatched, rather than took, the
handful of brushes which Porbus held out to him. As he did so his
beard, cut to a point, seemed to quiver with the eagerness of an
incontinent fancy; and while he filled his brush he muttered between
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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 Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: has gone to the other extreme. Every evening he plays dominoes, like
any bourgeois, in a cafe near the Prefecture, and Sundays he goes out
to a little box of a place he has bought near the forest of
Romainville, in the Saint-Gervais meadows; there he cultivates blue
dahlias, and talked, last year, of crowning a Rosiere. All that, my
dear colonel, is too bucolic to allow of my employing him on any
political police-work."
"I think myself," said Franchessini, "that in order not to attract
attention, he rolls himself too much into a ball."
"Make him unwind, and then, if he wants to return to active life and
take a hand in politics, he may find some honest way of doing so.
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: conscious, social labour, and to reduce her, like the field-tick, to the
passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the result of this
parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and intelligence of
the female, followed after a longer or shorter period by that of her male
descendants and her entire society.
Nevertheless, in the history of the past the dangers of the sex-parasitism
have never threatened more than a small section of the females of the human
race, those exclusively of some comparatively small dominant race or class;
the mass of women beneath them being still compelled to assume many forms
of strenuous activity. It is at the present day, and under the peculiar
conditions of our modern civilisation, that for the first time sex-
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