| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: doctrine of transmigration. Was he equally serious in the rest? For
example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men?
The latter is the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both white,
i.e. their every impulse is in harmony with reason; their dualism, on the
other hand, only carries out the figure of the chariot. Is he serious,
again, in regarding love as 'a madness'? That seems to arise out of the
antithesis to the former conception of love. At the same time he appears
to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno, and elsewhere, that there
is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in modern language genius, or
inspiration, or imagination, or idealism, or communion with God, which
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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 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of
evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like
the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment,
the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight
would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter
of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways,
and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been
extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful
reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a
district of some city in a nightmare. The thoughts of his mind,
besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: She shook her head slowly, and then, as she talked, seemed to
grow angry, sadly angry; and Daylight knew that this anger was
against him.
"Then let me explain, and just as straight and simply as you have
asked." She paused, as if casting about for a beginning. "You
are honest and straightforward. Do you want me to be honest and
straightforward as a woman is not supposed to be?--to tell you
things that will hurt you?--to make confessions that ought to
shame me? to behave in what many men would think was an
unwomanly manner?"
The arm around her shoulder pressed encouragement, but he did not
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others
to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and
healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their
misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in
darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have
started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to
their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the
pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them
over.
Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one
side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of
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