| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none
but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an
idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the
events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of
reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be
politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds
up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers.
What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder
in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt
without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon
the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent
 What is Man? |
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 Parmenides by Plato: the one as a whole, are more than one, must not those very things which
participate in the one be infinite in number?
How so?
Let us look at the matter thus:--Is it not a fact that in partaking of the
one they are not one, and do not partake of the one at the very time when
they are partaking of it?
Clearly.
They do so then as multitudes in which the one is not present?
Very true.
And if we were to abstract from them in idea the very smallest fraction,
must not that least fraction, if it does not partake of the one, be a
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