| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: them at all or went away again as soon as it appeared; and we may therefore
conclude that medicine is the science which is useful for getting rid of
disease. But if we are further asked, What is that from which, if we were
free, we should have no need of wealth? can we give an answer? If we have
none, suppose that we restate the question thus:--If a man could live
without food or drink, and yet suffer neither hunger nor thirst, would he
want either money or anything else in order to supply his needs?
ERYXIAS: He would not.
SOCRATES: And does not this apply in other cases? If we did not want for
the service of the body the things of which we now stand in need, and heat
and cold and the other bodily sensations were unperceived by us, there
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the
tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the
moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to
it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot
swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the
seekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular
places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror
was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality;
and as the investigators climbed round to the hill's summit by
safer routes they saw that the trail ended - or rather, reversed
- there.
 The Dunwich Horror |