| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: What time the thunder-clap, from burning bolt
That cracks the cloud, flies forth along. At times
The force of wind, excited from without,
Smiteth into a cloud already hot
With a ripe thunderbolt. And when that wind
Hath splintered that cloud, then down there cleaves forthwith
Yon fiery coil of flame which still we call,
Even with our fathers' word, a thunderbolt.
The same thing haps toward every other side
Whither that force hath swept. It happens, too,
That sometimes force of wind, though hurtled forth
Of The Nature of Things |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: discouraged by his failure with Mr. Balfour and the British Government.
He desired the Philippines for himself; we had not yet acquired them; we
were policing them, superintending the harbor, administering whatever had
fallen to us from Spain's defeat. The Kaiser sent, under Admiral
Diedrich, a squadron stronger than Dewey's.
Dewey indicated where the German was to anchor. "I am here by the order
of his Majesty the German Emperor," said Diedrich, and chose his own
place to anchor. He made it quite plain in other ways that he was taking
no orders from America. Dewey, so report has it, at last told him that
"if he wanted a fight he could have it at the drop of the hat." Then it
was that the German called on the English Admiral, Chichester, who was
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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 Anabasis by Xenophon: and property in Scillus, where he lived for many
years before having to move once more, to settle
in Corinth. He died in 354 B.C.
The Anabasis is his story of the march to Persia
to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and
take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing
return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a
leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
March 399 B.C.
PREPARER'S NOTE
This was typed from Dakyns' series, "The Works of Xenophon," a
Anabasis |
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 Timaeus by Plato: and placing them in the intervals, so that in each interval there were two
kinds of means, the one exceeding and exceeded by equal parts of its
extremes (as for example 1, 4/3, 2, in which the mean 4/3 is one-third of 1
more than 1, and one-third of 2 less than 2), the other being that kind of
mean which exceeds and is exceeded by an equal number (e.g.
- over 1, 4/3, 3/2, - over 2, 8/3, 3, - over 4, 16/3, 6, - over 8: and
- over 1, 3/2, 2, - over 3, 9/2, 6, - over 9, 27/2, 18, - over 27.).
Where there were intervals of 3/2 and of 4/3 and of 9/8, made by the
connecting terms in the former intervals, he filled up all the intervals of
4/3 with the interval of 9/8, leaving a fraction over; and the interval
which this fraction expressed was in the ratio of 256 to 243 (e.g.
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