| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy: Switzerland had played at various times the roles of Roumanian
princess, Spaniard of royal lineage, a poor medical student, and
the rich friend of a bishop. Her lying revealed a mixture of
imagination, boastfulness, deception, delusion, and
dissimulation. She romanced wonderfully about her royal birth
and wrote letters purporting to be from a cardinal to herself.
She fled disguised as a man from an educational institution to
Switzerland where her sex was discovered. It appeared that she
was subject to contrary sex feelings and thought of herself as a
man. She was under the observation of Krafft-Ebing at one time.
He considered it at least as a case of paranoia. Others had
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: assumes, are not like the images of the prophet Isaiah, or of the
Apocalypse, familiar to us in the days of our youth. By mysticism we mean,
not the extravagance of an erring fancy, but the concentration of reason in
feeling, the enthusiastic love of the good, the true, the one, the sense of
the infinity of knowledge and of the marvel of the human faculties. When
feeding upon such thoughts the 'wing of the soul' is renewed and gains
strength; she is raised above 'the manikins of earth' and their opinions,
waiting in wonder to know, and working with reverence to find out what God
in this or in another life may reveal to her.
ON THE DECLINE OF GREEK LITERATURE.
One of the main purposes of Plato in the Phaedrus is to satirize Rhetoric,
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