| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: He hesitated again, gripping the window strap, putting his
face forward and looking up to me appealingly.
"This seems bosh to you?"
"No, no!" I cried. "Go on. Tell me what this loggia was
like!"
"It was not really a loggia--I don't know what to call it. It
faced south. It was small. It was all in shadow except the
semicircle above the balcony that showed the sky and sea and the
corner where the girl stood. I was on a couch--it was a metal
couch with light striped cushions--and the girl was leaning over
the balcony with her back to me. The light of the sunrise fell on
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: ahead. We went along a steady gait, but not very
fast, and the fog got solider and solider, so solid that
Jim looked dim and ragged and smoky through it. It
was awful still, and we talked low and was anxious.
Now and then Jim would say:
"Highst her a p'int, Mars Tom, highst her!" and
up she would skip, a foot or two, and we would slide
right over a flat-roofed mud cabin, with people that
had been asleep on it just beginning to turn out and
gap and stretch; and once when a feller was clear up
on his hind legs so he could gap and stretch better, we
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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 Symposium by Plato: of which he is in want;--these are the sort of things which love and desire
seek?
Very true, he said.
Then now, said Socrates, let us recapitulate the argument. First, is not
love of something, and of something too which is wanting to a man?
Yes, he replied.
Remember further what you said in your speech, or if you do not remember I
will remind you: you said that the love of the beautiful set in order the
empire of the gods, for that of deformed things there is no love--did you
not say something of that kind?
Yes, said Agathon.
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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 Sophist by Plato: distinction between them? Take away the five greatest legislators, the
five greatest warriors, the five greatest poets, the five greatest founders
or teachers of a religion, the five greatest philosophers, the five
greatest inventors,--where would have been all that we most value in
knowledge or in life? And can that be a true theory of the history of
philosophy which, in Hegel's own language, 'does not allow the individual
to have his right'?
Once more, while we readily admit that the world is relative to the mind,
and the mind to the world, and that we must suppose a common or correlative
growth in them, we shrink from saying that this complex nature can contain,
even in outline, all the endless forms of Being and knowledge. Are we not
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