| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: sacred as another's; when we cannot defend both, let us defend one
with a stout heart. It is only in so far as we are doing this,
that we have any right to interfere: the defence of B is our only
ground of action against A. A has as good a right to go to the
devil, as we to go to glory; and neither knows what he does.
The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and
militant mongerings of moral half-truths, though they be sometimes
needful, though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an
inferior grade of duties. Ill-temper and envy and revenge find
here an arsenal of pious disguises; this is the playground of
inverted lusts. With a little more patience and a little less
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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 Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: same hour, to see if he should find him there again. In that case
the periodicity of his devotion would justify a scientific
investigation; for in such a man there ought to be no direct
antagonism of thought and action.
Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already
ceased to be Desplein's house surgeon, saw the great man's cab
standing at the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du
Petit-Lion, whence his friend jesuitically crept along by the
wall of Saint-Sulpice, and once more attended mass in front of
the Virgin's altar. It was Desplein, sure enough! The master-
surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper by chance. The
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