| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls
"the voice of God revealed in facts." True and noble is the passage
with which he begins his "Labyrinthus Medicorum," one of his attacks
on the false science of his day,
"The first and highest book of all healing," he says, "is called
wisdom, and without that book no man will carry out anything good or
useful . . . And that book is God Himself. For in Him alone who
hath created all things, the knowledge and principle of all things
dwells . . . without Him all is folly. As the sun shines on us from
above, so He must pour into us from above all arts whatsoever.
Therefore the root of all learning and cognition is, that we should
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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 Summer by Edith Wharton: first day. I can't see why, when she's got her own
home, and her father to work for her; nor Ida Targatt,
neither, when she got a legacy from her step-brother
on'y last year. But anyway we all live in the same
place, and when it's a place like North Dormer it's
enough to make people hate each other just to have to
walk down the same street every day. But you don't
live here, and you don't know anything about any of us,
so what did you have to meddle for? Do you suppose the
other girls'd have kept the books any better'n I did?
Why, Orma Fry don't hardly know a book from a flat-
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