| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: to know; he is inexperienced in the laws of the State, and in the language
which ought to be used in the dealings of man with man, whether private or
public, and utterly ignorant of the pleasures and desires of mankind and of
human character in general. And people of this sort, when they betake
themselves to politics or business, are as ridiculous as I imagine the
politicians to be, when they make their appearance in the arena of
philosophy. For, as Euripides says,
'Every man shines in that and pursues that, and devotes the greatest
portion of the day to that in which he most excels,' (Antiope, fragm. 20
(Dindorf).)
but anything in which he is inferior, he avoids and depreciates, and
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: two of human bodies--naked and headless. For a long moment she
watched, breathless; unable to believe the evidence of her own
eyes--that these grewsome things moved and had life! She saw them
crawling about on hands and knees over and across one another,
searching about with their fingers. And she saw some of them at
troughs, for which the others seemed to be searching, and those
at the troughs were taking something from these receptacles and
apparently putting it in a hole where their necks should have
been. They were not far beneath her--she could see them
distinctly and she saw that there were the bodies of both men and
women, and that they were beautifully proportioned, and that
The Chessmen of Mars |
