| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: respect to the growing incongruity between our Latin system of
education and the requirements of practical life:--
"In the three stages of instruction, those of childhood,
adolescence and youth, the theoretical and pedagogic preparation
by books on the school benches has lengthened out and become
overcharged in view of the examination, the degree, the diploma,
and the certificate, and solely in this view, and by the worst
methods, by the application of an unnatural and anti-social
regime, by the excessive postponement of the practical
apprenticeship, by our boarding-school system, by artificial
training and mechanical cramming, by overwork, without thought
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps
developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a
conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a
comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a
conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second
idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God
of the human heart. The writer would suggest that the great outline
of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world
unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful
attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. It
was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of
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