| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: the Bad Lands under Professor Cope, hunting mastodon bones, and I
overheard him say, his own self, that any plantigrade circumflex
vertebrate bacterium that hadn't wings and was uncertain was a
reptile. Well, then, has this dog any wings? No. Is he a
plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium? Maybe so, maybe not;
but without ever having seen him, and judging only by his illegal
and spectacular parentage, I will bet the odds of a bale of hay to
a bran mash that he looks it. Finally, is he uncertain? That is
the point - is he uncertain? I will leave it to you if you have
ever heard of a more uncertainer dog than what this one is?"
"No, I never have."
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: "But yet they give me no reply;
Your fountain might as well be dry."
"A wiser One than you, my friend,
Would wait and hear me to the end;
And for His eyes a light would shine
Through this unpleasant shell of mine
That in your fancy makes of me
A Christmas curiosity.
All right, I might be worse than that;
And you might now be lying flat;
I might have done it from behind,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: when you fellows get talking you sit up half the night."
"Half the night? - jamais de la vie! I follow a hygiene" - and St.
George rose to his feet.
"I see - you're hothouse plants," laughed the General. "That's the
way you produce your flowers."
"I produce mine between ten and one every morning - I bloom with a
regularity!" St. George went on.
"And with a splendour!" added the polite General, while Paul noted
how little the author of "Shadowmere" minded, as he phrased it to
himself, when addressed as a celebrated story-teller. The young
man had an idea HE should never get used to that; it would always
|
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 Theaetetus by Plato: knowledge on the Heraclitean flux? (c) Would he have asserted the
absoluteness of sensation at each instant? Of the work of Protagoras on
'Truth' we know nothing, with the exception of the two famous fragments,
which are cited in this dialogue, 'Man is the measure of all things,' and,
'Whether there are gods or not, I cannot tell.' Nor have we any other
trustworthy evidence of the tenets of Protagoras, or of the sense in which
his words are used. For later writers, including Aristotle in his
Metaphysics, have mixed up the Protagoras of Plato, as they have the
Socrates of Plato, with the real person.
Returning then to the Theaetetus, as the only possible source from which an
answer to these questions can be obtained, we may remark, that Plato had
|
