| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are
part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping
the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by
amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the
difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on
such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic
virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just
as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves,
and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self
hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy,
becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in
consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at
least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or
not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring
such a moral change about.
Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me
enliven our understanding of the definition by a concrete
example. I choose the quaint case of an unlettered man, Stephen
H. Bradley, whose experience is related in a scarce American
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