| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: is able to imitate the peculiarities of some absent member of the tribe,
it is very common to hear all in the camp convulsed with laughter."
With Europeans hardly anything excites laughter so easily as mimicry;
and it is rather curious to find the same fact with the savages of Australia,
who constitute one of the most distinct races in the world.
In Southern Africa with two tribes of Kafirs, especially with
the women, their eyes often fill with tears during laughter.
Gaika, the brother of the chief Sandilli, answers my query on
this bead, with the words, "Yes, that is their common practice."
Sir Andrew Smith has seen the painted face of a Hottentot
woman all furrowed with tears after a fit of laughter.
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: intimates the union of the spiritual and fleshly, the interpenetration of
the moral and intellectual faculties.
The divine image of beauty which resides within Socrates has been revealed;
the Silenus, or outward man, has now to be exhibited. The description of
Socrates follows immediately after the speech of Socrates; one is the
complement of the other. At the height of divine inspiration, when the
force of nature can no further go, by way of contrast to this extreme
idealism, Alcibiades, accompanied by a troop of revellers and a flute-girl,
staggers in, and being drunk is able to tell of things which he would have
been ashamed to make known if he had been sober. The state of his
affections towards Socrates, unintelligible to us and perverted as they
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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 Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: not yet buried. Yet all looked lovely in their sorrow, and a
numerous issue promising and grown up intimated that the family of
Davers would still flourish, and that the beauties of Rushbrook,
the mansion of the family, were not formed with so much art in vain
or to die with the present possessor.
After this we saw Brently, the seat of the Earl of Dysert, and the
ancient palace of my Lord Cornwallis, with several others of
exquisite situation, and adorned with the beauties both of art and
Nature, so that I think any traveller from abroad, who would desire
to see how the English gentry live, and what pleasures they enjoy,
should come into Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and take but a light
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our
centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects
unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of
being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be
forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating
condition of the effects be the openness of the "subliminal"
door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of
religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the
importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which
they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it
would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will,
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