| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: ships all his life and never know what real sailing is. From the
time I was twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea. When I was
fifteen I was captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop. By the
time I was sixteen I was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmon
with the Greeks up the Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on
the Fish Patrol. And I was a good sailor, too, though all my
cruising had been on San Francisco Bay and the rivers tributary to
it. I had never been on the ocean in my life.
Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an
able seaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months'
cruise across the Pacific and back again. As my shipmates
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: recovery. Insomnia is the opposite pole from my complaint; which
brings with it a nervous lethargy, an unkind, unwholesome, and
ungentle somnolence, fruitful in heavy heads and heavy eyes at
morning. You cannot sleep; well, I can best explain my state thus:
I cannot wake. Sleep, like the lees of a posset, lingers all day,
lead-heavy, in my knees and ankles. Weight on the shoulders,
torpor on the brain. And there is more than too much of that from
an ungrateful hound who is now enjoying his first decently
competent and peaceful weeks for close upon two years; happy in a
big brown moor behind him, and an incomparable burn by his side;
happy, above all, in some work - for at last I am at work with that
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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 Poems by Oscar Wilde: Before his gilded galiot ran naked vine-wreathed
corybants,
And lines of swaying elephants knelt down to
draw his chariot,
And lines of swarthy Nubians bare up his litter
as he rode
Down the great granite-paven road between the
nodding peacock-fans.
The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon
in their painted ships:
The meanest cup that touched his lips was
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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 Sophist by Plato: to predicate anything of anything; they say that good is good, and man is
man; and that to affirm one of the other would be making the many one and
the one many. Let us place them in a class with our previous opponents,
and interrogate both of them at once. Shall we assume (1) that being and
rest and motion, and all other things, are incommunicable with one another?
or (2) that they all have indiscriminate communion? or (3) that there is
communion of some and not of others? And we will consider the first
hypothesis first of all.
(1) If we suppose the universal separation of kinds, all theories alike are
swept away; the patrons of a single principle of rest or of motion, or of a
plurality of immutable ideas--all alike have the ground cut from under
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