| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: good feed, a forced march becomes necessary.
On reaching the night's stopping-place, the cook
for the day unpacks the cook-horse and at once sets
about the preparation of dinner. The other two attend
to the animals. And no matter how tired you
are, or how hungry you may be, you must take time
to bathe their backs with cold water; to stake the
picket-animal where it will at once get good feed and
not tangle its rope in bushes, roots, or stumps; to
hobble the others; and to bell those inclined to
wander. After this is done, it is well, for the peace and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: penetrated into a third of the farms of England; and that hundreds
of farmers still dawdle on after the fashion of their forefathers,
when by looking over the next hedge into their neighbour's field
they might double their produce and their profits? Did they not
know that the adaptation of steam to machinery would have
progressed just as slowly, had it not been a fact patent to babies
that an engine is stronger than a horse; and that if cotton, like
wheat and beef, had taken twelve months to manufacture, instead of
five minutes, Manchester foresight would probably have been as
short and as purblind as that of the British farmer? What right
had they to expect a better reception for the facts of Sanitary
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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 The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to
be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within. The
incarnation of ennui to which they are victims, joined to the need
they feel of getting a divorce from themselves, produces that passion
for moving about, for being somewhere else than where they are, which
distinguishes their species,--and also that of all beings devoid of
sensitiveness, and those who have missed their destiny, or who suffer
by their own fault.
Without really fathoming the vacuity and emptiness of Mademoiselle
Gamard's mind, or stating to himself the pettiness of her ideas, the
poor abbe perceived, unfortunately too late, the defects which she
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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 Phaedo by Plato: like Christ we have been inspired to utter the prayer, 'I in them, and thou
in me, that we may be all made perfect in one.' These precious moments, if
we have ever known them, are the nearest approach which we can make to the
idea of immortality.
14. Returning now to the earlier stage of human thought which is
represented by the writings of Plato, we find that many of the same
questions have already arisen: there is the same tendency to materialism;
the same inconsistency in the application of the idea of mind; the same
doubt whether the soul is to be regarded as a cause or as an effect; the
same falling back on moral convictions. In the Phaedo the soul is
conscious of her divine nature, and the separation from the body which has
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