| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon: possible."
The citizens of Athens are divided, as we all know, into ten tribes.
Let the state then assign to each of these ten tribes an equal number
of slaves, and let the tribes agree to associate their fortunes and
proceed to open new cuttings. What will happen? Any single tribe
hitting upon a productive lode will be the means of discovering what
is advantageous to all. Or, supposing two or three, or possibly the
half of them, hit upon a lode, clearly these several operations will
proportionally be more remunerative still. That the whole ten will
fail is not at all in accordance with what we should expect from the
history of the past. It is possible, of course, for private persons to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: about them seemed to me to be stretchers. There was
a feller come to the Sunday-school once, and had a
picture of them, and made a speech, and said the big-
gest pyramid covered thirteen acres, and was most five
hundred foot high, just a steep mountain, all built out
of hunks of stone as big as a bureau, and laid up
in perfectly regular layers, like stair-steps. Thirteen
acres, you see, for just one building; it's a farm. If
it hadn't been in Sunday-school, I would 'a' judged it
was a lie; and outside I was certain of it. And he
said there was a hole in the pyramid, and you could go
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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 Daisy Miller by Henry James: But the only very definite conclusion he came to was that he should
enjoy deucedly "going off" with her somewhere.
Two days afterward he went off with her to the Castle of Chillon.
He waited for her in the large hall of the hotel, where the couriers,
the servants, the foreign tourists, were lounging about and staring.
It was not the place he should have chosen, but she had appointed it.
She came tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves,
squeezing her folded parasol against her pretty figure,
dressed in the perfection of a soberly elegant traveling costume.
Winterbourne was a man of imagination and, as our ancestors
used to say, sensibility; as he looked at her dress and,
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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 Philebus by Plato: natural perceptions, and have nothing to do with reflection.
PROTARCHUS: In that case you are right in saying that the loss of
knowledge is not attended with pain.
SOCRATES: These pleasures of knowledge, then, are unmixed with pain; and
they are not the pleasures of the many but of a very few.
PROTARCHUS: Quite true.
SOCRATES: And now, having fairly separated the pure pleasures and those
which may be rightly termed impure, let us further add to our description
of them, that the pleasures which are in excess have no measure, but that
those which are not in excess have measure; the great, the excessive,
whether more or less frequent, we shall be right in referring to the class
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