| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: beyond herself. The analogy may even be pressed a step further: 'We are
more certain of our ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence
of God, and are led on in the order of thought from one to the other.' Or
more correctly: 'The existence of right and truth is the existence of God,
and can never for a moment be separated from Him.'
19. The main argument of the Phaedo is derived from the existence of
eternal ideas of which the soul is a partaker; the other argument of the
alternation of opposites is replaced by this. And there have not been
wanting philosophers of the idealist school who have imagined that the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a theory of knowledge, and that
in what has preceded Plato is accommodating himself to the popular belief.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: my whiskers scorching. Put yourself in my place;
feel as mean as I did, as ashamed as I felt -- wouldn't
YOU have struck below the belt to get even? Yes, you
would; it is simply human nature. Well, that is what
I did. I am not trying to justify it; I'm only saying
that I was mad, and ANYBODY would have done it.
Well, when I make up my mind to hit a man, I
don't plan out a love-tap; no, that isn't my way; as
long as I'm going to hit him at all, I'm going to hit
him a lifter. And I don't jump at him all of a sudden,
and risk making a blundering half-way business of it;
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: le comte your predecessor, for the credit of the thing, used to punch
holes with his penknife in the arms of his chair to make believe he
was working. And he makes such a mess of his room. I find everything
topsy-turvy. He has a very small mind. How about your man?"
"Mine? Oh, I have succeeded in training him. He knows exactly where
his letter-paper and envelopes, his wood, and his boxes and all the
rest of his things are. The other man used to swear at me, but this
one is as meek as a lamb,--still, he hasn't the grand style! Moreover,
he isn't decorated, and I don't like to serve a chief who isn't; he
might be taken for one of us, and that's humiliating. He carries the
office letter-paper home, and asked me if I couldn't go there and wait
|
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 Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: in me, because it was so evident from her manner and in all that she
did or said, down to the very inflections of her voice, that she had
an eye to the future. I went.
"Now, I will pass on to the final scenes of this adventure, throwing
in a few circumstances brought to light by time, and some details
guessed by Gobseck's perspicacity or by my own.
"When the Comte de Restaud apparently plunged into the vortex of
dissipation, something passed between the husband and wife, something
which remains an impenetrable secret, but the wife sank even lower in
the husband's eyes. As soon as he became so ill that he was obliged to
take to his bed, he manifested his aversion for the Countess and the
Gobseck |
