| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: own wilderness.
Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last
God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.
What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call
Lord and God? "Thou-shalt," is the great dragon called. But the spirit of
the lion saith, "I will."
"Thou-shalt," lieth in its path, sparkling with gold--a scale-covered
beast; and on every scale glittereth golden, "Thou shalt!"
The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus speaketh
the mightiest of all dragons: "All the values of things--glitter on me.
All values have already been created, and all created values--do I
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: have been more equally modified, in accordance with the paramount
importance of the relation of organism to organism.
I do not deny that there are many and grave difficulties in understanding
how several of the inhabitants of the more remote islands, whether still
retaining the same specific form or modified since their arrival, could
have reached their present homes. But the probability of many islands
having existed as halting-places, of which not a wreck now remains, must
not be overlooked. I will here give a single instance of one of the cases
of difficulty. Almost all oceanic islands, even the most isolated and
smallest, are inhabited by land-shells, generally by endemic species, but
sometimes by species found elsewhere. Dr. Aug. A. Gould has given several
On the Origin of Species |
