| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour,
all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant
conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us
in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of
steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and
do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery
competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve
man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of
machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is
asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying
cultivated leisure - which, and not labour, is the aim of man - or
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: that you were fully forty-two, and more than usually plain for your
age. Ernest has a strong upright nature. He is the very soul of
truth and honour. Disloyalty would be as impossible to him as
deception. But even men of the noblest possible moral character
are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms
of others. Modern, no less than Ancient History, supplies us with
many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so,
indeed, History would be quite unreadable.
CECILY. I beg your pardon, Gwendolen, did you say Ernest?
GWENDOLEN. Yes.
CECILY. Oh, but it is not Mr. Ernest Worthing who is my guardian.
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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 Critias by Plato: like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common about war and other
matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king
was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless
he had the assent of the majority of the ten.
Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of
Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the
following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as
the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and
well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed
true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the
various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They
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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 Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: their own existence.
There have been many other armies in the world that seemed to
possess the same fierce nature with the one which had now
sprouted from the dragon's teeth; but these, in the moonlit
field, were the more excusable, because they never had women
for their mothers. And how it would have rejoiced any great
captain, who was bent on conquering the world, like Alexander
or Napoleon, to raise a crop of armed soldiers as easily as
Jason did! For a while, the warriors stood flourishing their
weapons, clashing their swords against their shields, and
boiling over with the red-hot thirst for battle. Then they
Tanglewood Tales |
