| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: it be shut; and to draw out, with all its contents as they stand,
the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same thing) the
third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of mind, I have a
morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you
may know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial
and a paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you
to Cavendish Square exactly as it stands.
"That is the first part of the service: now for the second.
You should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this,
long before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin,
not only in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: which never gets of its own accord from anything to anything
else, and registers only predictions and subsumptions, or static
resemblances and differences. Nothing could be more unlike the
methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic. Let
me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish
transcendentalist whom I have already named.
"How are we to conceive," Principal Caird writes, "of the reality
in which all intelligence rests?" He replies: "Two things may
without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an
absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with
this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: And lit upon the ship, whose timbers creaked
As though the lading of three argosies
Were in the hold, and flapped its wings and shrieked,
And darkness straightway stole across the deep,
Sheathed was Orion's sword, dread Mars himself fled down the steep,
And the moon hid behind a tawny mask
Of drifting cloud, and from the ocean's marge
Rose the red plume, the huge and horned casque,
The seven-cubit spear, the brazen targe!
And clad in bright and burnished panoply
Athena strode across the stretch of sick and shivering sea!
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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 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient,
and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and
more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous
contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but
especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos, and
deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid purulent
matter; with sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and
crudeness of digestion, besides many others, needless to mention.
This doctor therefore proposed, "that upon the meeting of the
senate, certain physicians should attend it the three first days
of their sitting, and at the close of each day's debate feel the
Gulliver's Travels |
