| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward through
the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where
he might find a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.
But dusk
was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner
in shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in
the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but only stand
and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying
to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold and send him down the
dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed
valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: more under the necessity of separating the divine from the human, as two
spheres which had no communication with one another.
It is remarkable that Plato, speaking by the mouth of Parmenides, does not
treat even this second class of difficulties as hopeless or insoluble. He
says only that they cannot be explained without a long and laborious
demonstration: 'The teacher will require superhuman ability, and the
learner will be hard of understanding.' But an attempt must be made to
find an answer to them; for, as Socrates and Parmenides both admit, the
denial of abstract ideas is the destruction of the mind. We can easily
imagine that among the Greek schools of philosophy in the fourth century
before Christ a panic might arise from the denial of universals, similar to
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