| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: His will can be destroyed by mine?"
"That would be true if we knew what was really the will of God,"
replied the former prior of the Sorbonne. "Observe, my daughter, that
you put in an IF."
The poor woman, who expected to draw her uncle into a matrimonial
discussion by an argument ad omnipotentem, was stupefied; but persons
of obtuse mind have the terrible logic of children, which consists in
turning from answer to question,--a logic that is frequently
embarrassing.
"But, uncle, God did not make women intending them not to marry;
otherwise they ought all to stay unmarried; if not, they ought all to
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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 Alcibiades I by Plato: have never seen them, you have certainly heard from many people, including
Homer; for you have heard of the Iliad and Odyssey?
ALCIBIADES: To be sure, Socrates.
SOCRATES: A difference of just and unjust is the argument of those poems?
ALCIBIADES: True.
SOCRATES: Which difference caused all the wars and deaths of Trojans and
Achaeans, and the deaths of the suitors of Penelope in their quarrel with
Odysseus.
ALCIBIADES: Very true.
SOCRATES: And when the Athenians and Lacedaemonians and Boeotians fell at
Tanagra, and afterwards in the battle of Coronea, at which your father
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