| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: admitted before--that out of the greater came the less and out of the less
the greater, and that opposites were simply generated from opposites; but
now this principle seems to be utterly denied.
Socrates inclined his head to the speaker and listened. I like your
courage, he said, in reminding us of this. But you do not observe that
there is a difference in the two cases. For then we were speaking of
opposites in the concrete, and now of the essential opposite which, as is
affirmed, neither in us nor in nature can ever be at variance with itself:
then, my friend, we were speaking of things in which opposites are inherent
and which are called after them, but now about the opposites which are
inherent in them and which give their name to them; and these essential
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: `My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil beast
Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend?
Man was it who marred heaven's image in thee thus?'
Then, sputtering through the hedge of splintered teeth,
Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump
Pitch-blackened sawing the air, said the maimed churl,
`He took them and he drave them to his tower--
Some hold he was a table-knight of thine--
A hundred goodly ones--the Red Knight, he--
Lord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight
Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower;
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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 The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: surprise the dreary faces into any softening.
So three weeks passed--one week was left. It was Saturday evening
after supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and
bustle and shopping and larking, the streets were empty and
desolate. Richards and his old wife sat apart in their little
parlour--miserable and thinking. This was become their evening
habit now: the life-long habit which had preceded it, of reading,
knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or paying neighbourly
calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two or three weeks
ago; nobody talked now, nobody read, nobody visited--the whole
village sat at home, sighing, worrying, silent. Trying to guess out
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
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 In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: Tamaiti! But island scepticism is never deeper than the lips.
CHAPTER VII - THE KING OF APEMAMA
THUS all things on the island, even the priests of the gods, obey
the word of Tembinok'. He can give and take, and slay, and allay
the scruples of the conscientious, and do all things (apparently)
but interfere in the cookery of a turtle. 'I got power' is his
favourite word; it interlards his conversation; the thought haunts
him and is ever fresh; and when be has asked and meditates of
foreign countries, he looks up with a smile and reminds you, 'I got
POWER.' Nor is his delight only in the possession, but in the
exercise. He rejoices in the crooked and violent paths of kingship
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