| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: "Dear me!" said Sara Lee. "You are a long way off. And a long way
from home too."
They smiled. They looked, with their clean-shaven faces, absurdly young
after the bearded Belgian soldiers.
"I am an American, too," said Sara Lee with just a touch of homesickness
in her voice. She had been feeling lonely lately. "If you have time to
come in I could give you luncheon. Rene can tell us if any German air
machines come over."
Would they come in? Indeed, yes! They crawled down off the lorry, and
took off their caps, and ate every particle of food in the house. And,
though they were mutely curious at first, soon they were asking questions.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: of contemporary philosophy, the other not admitting of an entire solution.
(1) The difficulty which Socrates says that he experienced in explaining
generation and corruption; the assumption of hypotheses which proceed from
the less general to the more general, and are tested by their consequences;
the puzzle about greater and less; the resort to the method of ideas, which
to us appear only abstract terms,--these are to be explained out of the
position of Socrates and Plato in the history of philosophy. They were
living in a twilight between the sensible and the intellectual world, and
saw no way of connecting them. They could neither explain the relation of
ideas to phenomena, nor their correlation to one another. The very idea of
relation or comparison was embarrassing to them. Yet in this intellectual
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