| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: This last has not terrified you; how about the
next? or the next? or the one after that? There is
not the slightest danger. You appreciate this point
after you have met head-on some old-timer. After
you have speculated frantically how you are to pass
him, he solves the problem by calmly turning his
horse off the edge and sliding to the next lacet below.
Then you see that with a mountain horse it does not
much matter whether you get off such a trail or not.
The real bad places are quite as likely to be on
the level as on the slant. The tremendous granite
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: actual harvest of reliance upon traditional morality, upon the
biblical injunction to increase and multiply, a policy still taught by
politician, priest and militarist. Motherhood has been held
universally sacred; yet, as Bouchacourt pointed out, ``to-day, the
dregs of the human species, the blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate,
the nervous, the vicious, the idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and
the epileptics--are better protected than pregnant women.'' The
syphilitic, the irresponsible, the feeble-minded are encouraged to
breed unhindered, while all the powerful forces of tradition, of
custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the desperate effort to block
the inevitable influence of true civilization in spreading the
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