| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: sat for it died ages ago; and she did evil in her life. But, look-
again: there is my hand to the least line, there are my eyes and my
hair. What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this
poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you
dotingly dream that you love me) not a gesture that I can frame,
not a tone of my voice, not any look from my eyes, no, not even now
when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to others? Others,
ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have heard
the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The
hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me,
they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours
of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail,
by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people.
By the frame of the government under which we live, this same people
have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief;
and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little
to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain
their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of
wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government
in the short space of four years.
My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and WELL upon this
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: adapted to distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and
present to us.
To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can
scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped 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 Adam Bede by George Eliot: That is a base and selfish, even a blasphemous, spirit which
rejoices and is thankful over the past evil that has blighted or
crushed another, because it has been made a source of unforeseen
good to ourselves. Adam could never cease to mourn over that
mystery of human sorrow which had been brought so close to him; he
could never thank God for another's misery. And if I were capable
of that narrow-sighted joy in Adam's behalf, I should still know
he was not the man to feel it for himself. He would have shaken
his head at such a sentiment and said, "Evil's evil, and sorrow's
sorrow, and you can't alter it's natur by wrapping it up in other
words. Other folks were not created for my sake, that I should
Adam Bede |
