| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling: And they saw the sun-dogs in the haze and the seal upon the shore.
Silver and gray ran spit and bay to meet the steel-backed tide,
And pinched and white in the clearing light the crews stared overside.
O rainbow-gay the red pools lay that swilled and spilled and spread,
And gold, raw gold, the spent shell rolled between the careless dead --
The dead that rocked so drunkenwise to weather and to lee,
And they saw the work their hands had done as God had bade them see.
And a little breeze blew over the rail that made the headsails lift,
But no man stood by wheel or sheet, and they let the schooners drift.
And the rattle rose in Reuben's throat and he cast his soul with a cry,
Verses 1889-1896 |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: right, in relation to health and disease?
He will.
But can any one attain the knowledge of either unless he have a knowledge
of medicine?
He cannot.
No one at all, it would seem, except the physician can have this knowledge;
and therefore not the wise man; he would have to be a physician as well as
a wise man.
Very true.
Then, assuredly, wisdom or temperance, if only a science of science, and of
the absence of science or knowledge, will not be able to distinguish the
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