| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;
he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The
glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so
long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when
they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like
the executants who by their performance increase the power of
music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.
Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies
of such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day
almost forgotten, will survive in his special department without
crossing its limits. For must there not be some extraordinary
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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 Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey: "Jack, you an' the colonel are all the friends I ever hed, 'ceptin' that boy
lyin' quiet back there in the woods."
"I know you pretty well, and ain't sayin' a word about your runnin' off from
me on many a hunt, but I want to speak plain about this fellow Girty."
"Wal?" said Wetzel, as Zane hesitated.
"Twice in the last few years you and I have had it in for the same men, both
white-livered traitors. You remember? First it was Miller, who tried to ruin
my sister Betty, and next it was Jim Girty, who murdered our old friend, as
good an old man as ever wore moccasins. Wal, after Miller ran off from the
fort, we trailed him down to the river, and I points across and says, 'You or
me?' and you says, 'Me.' You was Betty's friend, and I knew she'd be avenged.
The Spirit of the Border |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: From thews and blood. But if 'twere possible,
Much rather might this very power of mind
Be in the head, the shoulders or the heels,
And, born in any part soever, yet
In the same man, in the same vessel abide.
But since within this body even of ours
Stands fixed and appears arranged sure
Where soul and mind can each exist and grow,
Deny we must the more that they can have
Duration and birth, wholly outside the frame.
For, verily, the mortal to conjoin
Of The Nature of Things |
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 Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: he employs to the common disadvantage by creating political
institutions of a socially destructive type; and finally by its
reactions on the activities of war it constitutes an agent for the
wholesale physical destruction of man and his works and the extinction
of human culture.''
It is not necessary to be in absolute agreement with this
diagnostician to realize the menace of machinery, which tends to
emphasize quantity and mere number at the expense of quality and
individuality. One thing is certain. If machinery is detrimental to
biological fitness, the machine must be destroyed, as it was in Samuel
Butler's ``Erewhon.'' But perhaps there is another way of mastering
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