| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: good; and he can only do them good by knowledge; and as he is still without
knowledge, he can have as yet no conceit of knowledge. In this manner
Socrates reads a lesson to Hippothales, the foolish lover of Lysis,
respecting the style of conversation which he should address to his
beloved.
After the return of Menexenus, Socrates, at the request of Lysis, asks him
a new question: 'What is friendship? You, Menexenus, who have a friend
already, can tell me, who am always longing to find one, what is the secret
of this great blessing.'
When one man loves another, which is the friend--he who loves, or he who is
loved? Or are both friends? From the first of these suppositions they are
Lysis |
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 Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: creatures by the bonds of love. The conception of its attainment
is incompatible with the conception of the movement of life.
What kind of life could subsist if all living creatures were
joined together by the bonds of love? None. Our conception of
life is inseparably bound up with the conception of a continual
striving after an unattainable ideal.
But even if we suppose the Christian ideal of perfect chastity
realized, what then? We should merely find ourselves face to
face on the one hand with the familiar teaching of religion, one
of whose dogmas is that the world will have an end; and on the
other of so-called science, which informs us that the sun is
The Kreutzer Sonata |
