| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: which voluntarily works harm to the body, more of the healing art?
HIPPIAS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then in the art of medicine the voluntary is better than the
involuntary?
HIPPIAS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Well, and in lute-playing and in flute-playing, and in all arts
and sciences, is not that mind the better which voluntarily does what is
evil and dishonourable, and goes wrong, and is not the worse that which
does so involuntarily?
HIPPIAS: That is evident.
SOCRATES: And what would you say of the characters of slaves? Should we
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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 Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost
its point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the
dependence, SOMEHOW, of the mind upon the body.
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of
discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We
all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of
mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticize
our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but'
expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and
hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities,
our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of
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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 Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: not taken with him two children who at present were troublesome, and
in the future would stand in the way of her pretensions? Her most
intimate friends, as much as her least persistent admirers, seeing
about her none of Cornelia's jewels, who come and go, and
unconsciously betray their mother's age, took her for quite a young
woman. The two boys, about whom she seemed so anxious in her petition,
were, like their father, as unknown in the world as the northwest
passage is unknown to navigators. M. d'Espard was supposed to be an
eccentric personage who had deserted his wife without having the
smallest cause for complaint against her.
Mistress of herself at two-and-twenty, and mistress of her fortune of
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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 The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: distributing this work of ecclesiastical research. I walked along
the Embankment and saw the pitiful wretches, men, women and
sometimes children, clad in filthy rags, starved white and frozen
blue, soaked in winter rains and shivering in winter winds,
homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors of divinity,
unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative". I walked on Hampstead
Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns out
for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror,
for I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These
creatures were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were
some new grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could
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