| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: future ages. That fixed idea might degenerate--did, alas!
degenerate--into wild self-conceit, rash contempt of the ancients,
violent abuse of his opponents. But there was more than this in
Paracelsus. He had one idea to which, if he had kept true, his life
would have been a happier one--the firm belief that all pure science
was a revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second
or third hand, by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or
Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic
philosophers round him did) in the place of God: but by going
straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls
"the voice of God revealed in facts." True and noble is the passage
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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 Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: became difficult to choose a path, and the lads somewhat wandered.
They were weary, besides, with yesterday's exertions and the lack
of food, and they moved but heavily and dragged their feet among
the sand.
Presently, coming to the top of a knoll, they were aware of the
leper, some hundred feet in front of them, crossing the line of
their march by a hollow. His bell was silent, his staff no longer
tapped the ground, and he went before him with the swift and
assured footsteps of a man who sees. Next moment he had
disappeared into a little thicket.
The lads, at the first glimpse, had crouched behind a tuft of
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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 The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: So the farmer has to be an expert, and when the water in his
barrel is just hot enough, he souses the porker in it, holding it
in the hot bath the right length of time, then pulling it out and
scraping off the hair. Farmers learned this art by experience
long before the days of book farming.
And so the metal "pig boiler" ages ago learned by experience
how to make the proper "heat" to boil the impurities out of pig-
iron, or forge iron, and change it into that finer product,
wrought iron. Pig-iron contains silicon, sulphur and phosphorus,
and these impurities make it brittle so that a cast iron
teakettle will break at a blow, like a china cup. Armor of this
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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 La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: of Tours, bringing the two children with her to breathe the fresh,
cool air along the Loire, and to watch the sunset effects on a
landscape as wide as the Bay of Naples or the Lake of Geneva.
During the whole time of her stay at La Grenadiere she went but twice
into Tours; once to call on the headmaster of the school, to ask him
to give her the names of the best masters of Latin, drawing, and
mathematics; and a second time to make arrangements for the children's
lessons. But her appearance on the bridge of an evening, once or twice
a week, was quite enough to excite the interest of almost all the
inhabitants of Tours, who make a regular promenade of the bridge.
Still, in spite of a kind of spy system, by which no harm is meant, a
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