| 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: translation of a language, especially of a dead language, is
totally impossible. What do we do in reality when we substitute
a French for a Latin, Greek, or Sanscrit expression, or even when
we endeavour to understand a book written in our own tongue two
or three centuries back? We merely put the images and ideas with
which modern life has endowed our intelligence in the place of
absolutely distinct notions and images which ancient life had
brought into being in the mind of races submitted to conditions
of existence having no analogy with our own. When the men of the
Revolution imagined they were copying the Greeks and Romans, what
were they doing except giving to ancient words a sense the latter
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: at present, than that it hath been in all ages defended by many
learned men, and among the rest by Socrates himself, whom I look
upon as undoubtedly the wisest of uninspir'd mortals: To which if
we add, that those who have condemned this art, though otherwise
learned, having been such as either did not apply their studies
this way, or at least did not succeed in their applications;
their testimony will not be of much weight to its disadvantage,
since they are liable to the common objection of condemning what
they did not understand.
Nor am I at all offended, or think it an injury to the art, when
I see the common dealers in it, the students in astrology, the
|
