| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: there are no fairies?
You don't see the logic of that? Perhaps not. Then please not to
see the logic of a great many arguments exactly like it, which you
will hear before your beard is gray.
The kind old dame came back at twelve, when school was over, to
look at Tom: but there was no Tom there. She looked about for his
footprints; but the ground was so hard that there was no slot, as
they say in dear old North Devon. And if you grow up to be a brave
healthy man, you may know some day what no slot means, and know
too, I hope, what a slot does mean - a broad slot, with blunt
claws, which makes a man put out his cigar, and set his teeth, and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister: pouring brook. They went by the few lights of Mattapan, seeing from
some points on their way the beacons of the harbor, and again the
curving line of lamps that drew the outline of some village built upon a
hill. Dawn showed them Jamaica Pond, smooth and breezeless, and
encircled with green skeins of foliage, delicate and new. Here
multitudinous birds were chirping their tiny, overwhelming chorus. When
at length, across the flat suburban spaces, they again sighted Memorial
tower, small in the distance, the sun was lighting it.
Confronted by this, thoughts of hitherto banished care, and of the
morrow that was now to-day, and of Philosophy 4 coming in a very few
hours, might naturally have arisen and darkened the end of their
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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 Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: well-being by the simultaneous increase of commodities
and diminution of hours of labor.
This subject has been specially studied by Kropotkin,
who, whatever may be thought of his general
theories of politics, is remarkably instructive, concrete
and convincing in all that he says about the
possibilities of agriculture. Socialists and Anarchists
in the main are products of industrial life, and
few among them have any practical knowledge on the
subject of food production. But Kropotkin is an
exception. His two books, ``The Conquest of Bread''
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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 Before Adam by Jack London: call the Mid-Pleistocene. He fell from the trees but
did not strike bottom. He gibbered with fear at the
roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts of
prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with
his kind in council, and he received rough usage at the
hands of the Fire People in the day that he fled before
them.
But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial
memories are not ours as well, seeing that we have a
vague other-personality that falls through space while
we sleep?
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