| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: of the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a
quality is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in
apposition with the noun.
That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no
sense a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a
natural state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two
ways. In the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality
directly. A Japanese does not say, "The scenery is fine," but
simply, "Scenery, fine." Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly
employed in such a manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but
by an adverb. Not "She is beautiful, but "She exists beautifully,"
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