| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: rather because I am convinced that I never intentionally wronged any one,
although I cannot convince you--the time has been too short; if there were
a law at Athens, as there is in other cities, that a capital cause should
not be decided in one day, then I believe that I should have convinced you.
But I cannot in a moment refute great slanders; and, as I am convinced that
I never wronged another, I will assuredly not wrong myself. I will not say
of myself that I deserve any evil, or propose any penalty. Why should I?
because I am afraid of the penalty of death which Meletus proposes? When I
do not know whether death is a good or an evil, why should I propose a
penalty which would certainly be an evil? Shall I say imprisonment? And
why should I live in prison, and be the slave of the magistrates of the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: filled too many real functions to be thought a sponger; moreover he
possesses a small estate in a certain department, the name of which he
has never been known to utter.
"Madame Firmiani? why, my dear fellow, she was Murat's former
mistress." This man belongs to the Contradictors,--persons who note
errata in memoirs, rectify dates, correct facts, bet a hundred to one,
and are certain about everything. You can easily detect them in some
gross blunder in the course of a single evening. They will tell you
they were in Paris at the time of Mallet's conspiracy, forgetting that
half an hour earlier they had described how they had crossed the
Beresina. Nearly all Contradictors are "chevaliers" of the Legion of
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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 The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: If man be told that the microscope and scalpel show no difference,
in the first stage of visible existence, between him and the lower
mammals, then he has a right to answer--as he will answer--So much
the worse for the microscope and scalpel: so much the better for my
old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life, death, a
substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible,
unknowable by any physical science whatsoever. If you cannot render
me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who
will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a
rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from some
magical theory; as did the mind of the eighteenth century when,
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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 Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: this little space was every evening brilliantly lit up, not
only by the light upon the stair and the great signal-lamp
below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the bar-room
window. The George thus brightly advertised itself to
passers-by in the cold street. Fettes walked steadily to the
spot, and we, who were hanging behind, beheld the two men
meet, as one of them had phrased it, face to face. Dr.
Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set off
his pale and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was
richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of
linen, with a great gold watch-chain, and studs and
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