| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: noises and fearful silence, the silence of a father devouring his dead
sons; to wonder at the laughter of the damned; to look for some human
form among the livid heaps wrung and trampled by crime; to learn words
such as living men may not hear without dying; to call perpetually on
the dead, and always to accuse and condemn!--Is that living?"
"Cease!" cried Godefroid; "I cannot see you or hear you any further!
My reason wanders, my eyes are dim. You light a fire within me which
consumes me."
"And yet I must go on!" said the senior, waving his hand with a
strange gesture that worked on the youth like a spell.
For a moment the old man fixed Godefroid with his large, weary,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: men.
Certainly he is.
Yet I should like to know one thing more: which of the different kinds of
knowledge makes him happy? or do all equally make him happy?
Not all equally, he replied.
But which most tends to make him happy? the knowledge of what past,
present, or future thing? May I infer this to be the knowledge of the game
of draughts?
Nonsense about the game of draughts.
Or of computation?
No.
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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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: growth of a fresh one in the same cell.
But all the sea-weeds, in common with other vegetables, perform
this function continually, and thus maintain the water in which
they grow in a state fit to support animal life.
This fact - first advanced by Priestley and Ingenhousz, and though
doubted by the great Ellis, satisfactorily ascertained by Professor
Daubeny, Mr. Ward, Dr. Johnston, and Mr. Warrington - gives an
answer to the question, which I hope has ere now arisen in the
minds of some of my readers, -
How is it possible to see these wonders at home? Beautiful and
instructive as they may be, can they be meant for any but dwellers
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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 Before Adam by Jack London: the pursuing-monster dream, color dreams, suffocation
dreams, and the reptile and vermin dreams. In short,
while this other-personality is vestigial in all of us,
in some of us it is almost obliterated, while in others
of us it is more pronounced. Some of us have stronger
and completer race memories than others.
It is all a question of varying degree of possession of
the other-personality. In myself, the degree of
possession is enormous. My other-personality is almost
equal in power with my own personality. And in this
matter I am, as I said, a freak--a freak of heredity.
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