| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: to opinion which is devoid of intelligence. In such a case should we not
be right if we said that the state would be full of anarchy and
lawlessness?
ALCIBIADES: Decidedly.
SOCRATES: But ought we not then, think you, either to fancy that we know
or really to know, what we confidently propose to do or say?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And if a person does that which he knows or supposes that he
knows, and the result is beneficial, he will act advantageously both for
himself and for the state?
ALCIBIADES: True.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: hound and huntsman sweep across his field, and a year's sparing and
labouring is as though it had not been. If he can see the ruin with
a good enough grace, who knows but he may fall in favour with my
lord; who knows but his son may become the last and least among the
servants at his lordship's kennel - one of the two poor varlets who
get no wages and sleep at night among the hounds?
For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming
him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had
been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or
lay over-seas in an English prison. In these dark days, when 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 Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initiated.
To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will
quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.
Al-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished
in the eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors
of the Moslem church, has left us one of the few autobiographies
to be found outside of Christian literature. Strange that a
species of book so abundant among ourselves should be so little
represented elsewhere--the absence of strictly personal
confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary
student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness
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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 A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: offered for suspension was ludicrously false; in May 1889, when Sir
Edward Malet moved the matter in the conference, the election of
Mataafa was not only certain to have been peaceful, it could not
have been opposed; and behind the English puppet it was easy to
suspect the hand of Germany. No one is more swift to smell
trickery than a Samoan; and the thought, that, under the long,
bland, benevolent sentences of the Berlin Act, some trickery lay
lurking, filled him with the breath of opposition. Laupepa seems
never to have been a popular king. Mataafa, on the other hand,
holds an unrivalled position in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen;
he was the hero of the war, he had lain with them in the bush, he
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