| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: "Yes, except as to his writing her such short letters.
She made me almost laugh; but I cannot rate so very highly
the love or good-nature of a brother who will not give
himself the trouble of writing anything worth reading
to his sisters, when they are separated. I am sure William
would never have used _me_ so, under any circumstances.
And what right had she to suppose that _you_ would not write
long letters when you were absent?"
"The right of a lively mind, Fanny, seizing whatever
may contribute to its own amusement or that of others;
perfectly allowable, when untinctured by ill-humour
Mansfield Park |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: "natural" than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning
flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her NAIVETE in
egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the
incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and
virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for
the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that she seems more
afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more
condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and
sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in
the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy,
which rends while it delights--What? And all that is now to be at
Beyond Good and Evil |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: of the other."
"So it was a regular plot--a kind of conspiracy?"
"Oh, a conspiracy--we were only two," I replied, leaving out
Mrs. Prest of course.
She hesitated; I thought she was perhaps going to say that we had been
very base. But she remarked after a moment, in a candid, wondering way,
"How much you must want them!"
"Oh, I do, passionately!" I conceded, smiling. And this chance
made me go on, forgetting my compunction of a moment before.
"How can she possibly have changed their place herself?
How can she walk? How can she arrive at that sort of muscular exertion?
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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: adapted to distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and
present to us.
To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can
scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped to
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