| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: tub, and said to his model, "That will do for to-day."
Agathe raised her eyes and saw, in a corner of the atelier where her
glance had not before penetrated, a nude woman sitting on a stool, the
sight of whom drove her away horrified.
"You are not to have the little Bridau here any more," said Chaudet to
his pupils, "it annoys his mother."
"Eugh!" they all cried, as Agathe closed the door.
No sooner did the students of sculpture and painting find out that
Madame Bridau did not wish her son to be an artist, than their whole
happiness centred on getting Joseph among them. In spite of a promise
not to go to the Institute which his mother exacted from him, the
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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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: indifference to mankind. The fact becomes all the more evident when
we descend from sex to gender. That Father Ocean does not, in their
verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle suggestion of
humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints without
expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental
speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied
now in the very character of the words he uses. A Japanese noun is
a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of
the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does it represent that
it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather the outcome
of a first vague generality. The word "man," for instance, means to
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