| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: midnight, and the thick snowflakes were sifting down--everything was
so silent that he could hear the rustle of them as they fell. In the
few seconds that he stood there hesitating he was covered white.
He set off at a run for the yards, stopping by the way to inquire in
the saloons that were open. Ona might have been overcome on the way;
or else she might have met with an accident in the machines. When he
got to the place where she worked he inquired of one of the watchmen--
there had not been any accident, so far as the man had heard. At the
time office, which he found already open, the clerk told him that
Ona's check had been turned in the night before, showing that she
had left her work.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: down. The child, no doubt, has within it latent capacities which, when
years and training have done their work, will enable him to reap a
harvest from a fertile soil, and the new sown field will be covered
with golden grain in August. But these facts will not enable the
infant to still its hunger with the clods of the earth in the cold
spring time. It is just like that with emigration. It is simply
criminal to take a multitude of untrained men and women and land them
penniless and helpless on the fringe of some new continent. The result
of such proceedings we see in the American cities; in the degradation
of their slums, and in the hopeless demoralisation of thousands who, in
their own country, were living decent, industrious lives.
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: he told "the truth" (in allusion to the title of his book, which was called
"The Truth") in secret to his disciples. For he was really a votary of
that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be relative; nothing
is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all is in motion and
mixture and transition and flux and generation, not "being," as we
ignorantly affirm, but "becoming." This has been the doctrine, not of
Protagoras only, but of all philosophers, with the single exception of
Parmenides; Empedocles, Heracleitus, and others, and all the poets, with
Epicharmus, the king of Comedy, and Homer, the king of Tragedy, at their
head, have said the same; the latter has these words--
"Ocean, whence the gods sprang, and mother Tethys."
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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 Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: was darkling; the blue sky above grew momentarily deeper,
and the little stars one by one pierced the attenuated light;
the interspaces of the trees, the gaps in the further vegetation,
that had been hazy blue in the daylight, grew black and mysterious.
I pushed on. The colour vanished from the world.
The tree-tops rose against the luminous blue sky in inky silhouette,
and all below that outline melted into one formless blackness.
Presently the trees grew thinner, and the shrubby undergrowth
more abundant. Then there was a desolate space covered with
a white sand, and then another expanse of tangled bushes.
I did not remember crossing the sand-opening before.
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
