| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: of the reliquary in which Don Juan lay. The blasphemer's body
sparkled with gems, and flowers, and crystal, with diamonds and
gold, and plumes white as the wings of seraphim; they had set it
up on the altar, where the pictures of Christ had stood. All
about him blazed a host of tall candles; the air quivered in the
radiant light. The worthy Abbot of San-Lucar, in pontifical
robes, with his mitre set with precious stones, his rochet and
golden crosier, sat enthroned in imperial state among his clergy
in the choir. Rows of impassive aged faces, silver-haired old men
clad in fine linen albs, were grouped about him, as the saints
who confessed Christ on earth are set by painters, each in his
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister: "It has no existence," replied the tutor, complacently.
"But a billion dollars is inconceivable," retorted the boy. "No mind
can take in a sum of that size; but it exists."
"Put that down! put that down!" shrieked the other boy. "You've struck
something. If we get Berkeley on the paper, I'll run that in." He
wrote rapidly, and then took a turn around the room, frowning as he
walked. "The actuality of a thing," said he, summing his clever
thoughts up, "is not disproved by its being inconceivable. Ideas alone
depend upon thought for their existence. There! Anybody can get off
stuff like that by the yard." He picked up a cork and a foot-rule,
tossed the cork, and sent it flying out of the window with the
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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 The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: Committees.
This state of affairs would probably be more actively
resented if the people were capable of resenting anything
but their own hunger, or of fearing anything but a general
collapse which would turn that hunger into starvation. It
must be remembered that the urgency of the economic crisis
has driven political questions into the background. The
Communists (compare Rykov's remarks on this subject,
p. 175) believe that this is the natural result of social
revolution. They think that political parties will disappear
altogether and that people will band together, not for the
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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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none
in the world.
And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed;
a creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who
escape the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of
the human race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better,
men who had, when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good
reason to be sad; and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up
over the whole of Northern Europe, and even beyond it, along the
dreary western shores of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a
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