| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: palaces with no better foundation than sand and mud: they laud the virtues
very highly, and exhibit them as estimable far above anything on earth;
but they give us no adequate criterion of virtue, and frequently that
which they designate with so fine a name is but apathy, or pride,
or despair, or parricide.
I revered our theology, and aspired as much as any one to reach heaven:
but being given assuredly to understand that the way is not less open to
the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths
which lead to heaven are above our comprehension, I did not presume to
subject them to the impotency of my reason; and I thought that in order
competently to undertake their examination, there was need of some special
 Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: second view has been often overstated by those who, like Hegel himself,
have tended to confuse ancient with modern philosophy. We need not deny
that Plato, trained in the school of Cratylus and Heracleitus, may have
seen that a contradiction in terms is sometimes the best expression of a
truth higher than either (compare Soph.). But his ideal theory is not
based on antinomies. The correlation of Ideas was the metaphysical
difficulty of the age in which he lived; and the Megarian and Cynic
philosophy was a 'reductio ad absurdum' of their isolation. To restore
them to their natural connexion and to detect the negative element in them
is the aim of Plato in the Sophist. But his view of their connexion falls
very far short of the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being. The Being
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