| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard: Then she went, leaving me feeling smaller than ever I felt in my life,
before or since--even smaller than when I walked into the presence of
old Zikali the Wise. Why, I wondered, had she first made a fool of me,
and then thrown away the fruits of my folly? To this hour I cannot
quite answer the question, though I believe the explanation to be that
she did really care for me, and was anxious not to involve me in trouble
and her plottings; also she may have been wise enough to see that our
natures were as oil and water and would never blend.
CHAPTER V
TWO BUCKS AND THE DOE
It may be thought that, as a sequel to this somewhat remarkable scene in
Child of Storm |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: concealment: Zeus has taken from men the power of foreseeing death, and
brings together the souls both of them and their judges naked and
undisguised at the judgment-seat. Both are exposed to view, stripped of
the veils and clothes which might prevent them from seeing into or being
seen by one another.
The myth of the Phaedo is of the same type, but it is more cosmological,
and also more poetical. The beautiful and ingenious fancy occurs to Plato
that the upper atmosphere is an earth and heaven in one, a glorified earth,
fairer and purer than that in which we dwell. As the fishes live in the
ocean, mankind are living in a lower sphere, out of which they put their
heads for a moment or two and behold a world beyond. The earth which we
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