| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: composing the crowd--and to be induced to commit acts contrary to
his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An
individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of
sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts
of which each individual juror would disapprove, that
parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of
their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken
separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens
of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to
give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine
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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 Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: them, the associates who entertain them, the children who
comfort them and bring joy to the mimic home.
Toys are nature's first teachers. The child with his little
shovels, spades and hoes, learns his first lessons in
agriculture; with his hammer and nails, he gets his first
lessons in the various trades; and the bias of the life of many a
child of larger growth has come from the toys with which he
played. Into his flower garden the father of Linnaeus
introduced his son during his infancy, and "this little garden
undoubtedly created that taste in the child which afterwards
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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 Hiero by Xenophon: same rewards that you gave to Harmodius and Aristogiton,"
concerning whom Simonides himself wrote a votive couplet:
{'E meg' 'Athenaioisi phoos geneth' enik' 'Aristogeiton
'Ipparkhon kteine kai 'Armodios.}
But if you imagine that the tyrant, because he has more possessions
than the private person, does for that reason derive greater pleasure
from them, this is not so either, Simonides, but it is with tyrants as
with athletes. Just as the athlete feels no glow of satisfaction in
asserting his superiority over amateurs,[12] but annoyance rather when
he sustains defeat at the hands of any real antagonist; so, too, the
tyrant finds little consolation in the fact[13] that he is evidently
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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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from it somewhat
largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de
Tocqueville's book is founded on researches into the French
Archives, which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him;
and contains innumerable significant facts, which are to be found
(as far as I am aware) in no other accessible work.
The French people--says M. de Tocqueville--made, in 1789, the
greatest effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to
speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that
which they had heretofore been, from that which they sought to
become hereafter. But he had long thought that they had succeeded
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