| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: to investigate the morbid outbreak of a feverish man. He did not
look as though he were actually delirious, and that for the moment
must suffice. Schultz made a dart forward.
"That fellow means harm!" he said desperately. "He means harm to
you, Captain Allen. I feel it, and I - "
He choked with inexplicable emotion.
"All right, Schultz. I won't give him an opening." Jasper cut him
short and swung himself into the boat.
On board the Neptun Heemskirk, standing straddle-legs in the flood
of moonlight, his inky shadow falling right across the quarter-
deck, made no sign at his approach, but secretly he felt something
'Twixt Land & Sea |
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 The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: what he now professes. As for science proper, it has reached at his
hands only the quasimorphologic stage; that is, it consists of
catalogues concocted according to the ingenuity of the individual
and resembles the real thing about as much as a haphazard
arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemble a man.
Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the
mere outward semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientific
collections of facts which never rise to be classifications of
phenomena forms to his idea the acme of erudition. His mathematics,
for example, consists of a set of empiric rules, of which no
explanation is ever vouchsafed the taught for the simple reason that
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