| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: afternoon. Thither he betook himself, consumed by well-founded
suspicions. It was impossible that the President should have foreseen
the arrival of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse upon the scene, the return
of the public prosecutor, and the hasty confabulation of his learned
brethren; so he had omitted to trace out a plan for du Croisier's
guidance in the event of the preliminary examination taking place.
Neither of the pair imagined that the proceedings would be hurried on
in this way. Du Croisier obeyed the summons at once; he wanted to know
how M. Camusot was disposed to act. So he was compelled to answer the
questions put to him. Camusot addressed him in summary fashion with
the six following inquiries:--
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge
of the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.
In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle,
Lord Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,
he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.
The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like
his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his
reason and to tyrannize over the whole man.
There are too many places in the Plays where this happens.
Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his
What is Man? |
