| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: passage.' I wrote on a leaf torn from my book, and placed it and the
money in Kearny's hand.
"'Good-bye,' I said, extending my own. 'It is not that I am displeased
with you; but there is no place in this expedition for--let us say,
the Senorita Phoebe.' I said this with a smile, trying to smooth the
thing for him. 'May you have better luck, /companero/.'
"Kearny took the money and the paper.
"'It was just a little touch,' said he, 'just a little lift with the
toe of my boot--but what's the odds?--that blamed mule would have died
if I had only dusted his ribs with a powder puff. It was my luck.
Well, Captain, I would have liked to be in that little fight with you
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: at the end of the dialogue, also indicates a comparatively early date. The
imaginative element is still in full vigour; the Socrates of the Cratylus
is the Socrates of the Apology and Symposium, not yet Platonized; and he
describes, as in the Theaetetus, the philosophy of Heracleitus by
'unsavoury' similes--he cannot believe that the world is like 'a leaky
vessel,' or 'a man who has a running at the nose'; he attributes the flux
of the world to the swimming in some folks' heads. On the other hand, the
relation of thought to language is omitted here, but is treated of in the
Sophist. These grounds are not sufficient to enable us to arrive at a
precise conclusion. But we shall not be far wrong in placing the Cratylus
about the middle, or at any rate in the first half, of the series.
|
