| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: A sudden thrill of horror and surprise made him hastily draw back,
but he again advanced and felt more carefully.
His senses had not deceived him; a body did indeed lie there;
and he soon ascertained that, although icy cold at
the extremities, there was some vital heat remaining.
In less time than it takes to tell it, Harry had drawn the body
from the recess to the bottom of the shaft, and, seizing his lamp,
he cast its lights on what he had found, exclaiming immediately,
"Why, it is a child!"
The child still breathed, but so very feebly that Harry expected
it to cease every instant. Not a moment was to be lost;
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: yet settled down into a single system. Plato uses them, though he also
criticises them; he acknowledges that both he and others are always talking
about them, especially about the Idea of Good; and that they are not
peculiar to himself (Phaedo; Republic; Soph.). But in his later writings
he seems to have laid aside the old forms of them. As he proceeds he makes
for himself new modes of expression more akin to the Aristotelian logic.
Yet amid all these varieties and incongruities, there is a common meaning
or spirit which pervades his writings, both those in which he treats of the
ideas and those in which he is silent about them. This is the spirit of
idealism, which in the history of philosophy has had many names and taken
many forms, and has in a measure influenced those who seemed to be most
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