| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: Proceeding upon these principles we appear to arrive at the conclusion that
nineteen-twentieths of all the writings which have ever been ascribed to
Plato, are undoubtedly genuine. There is another portion of them,
including the Epistles, the Epinomis, the dialogues rejected by the
ancients themselves, namely, the Axiochus, De justo, De virtute, Demodocus,
Sisyphus, Eryxias, which on grounds, both of internal and external
evidence, we are able with equal certainty to reject. But there still
remains a small portion of which we are unable to affirm either that they
are genuine or spurious. They may have been written in youth, or possibly
like the works of some painters, may be partly or wholly the compositions
of pupils; or they may have been the writings of some contemporary
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling
which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny
as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be
disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific,
but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete
actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a
feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half
made up.[336]
[336] Compare Lotze's doctrine that the only meaning we can
attach to the notion of a thing as it is "in itself" is by
conceiving it as it is FOR itself, i.e., as a piece of full
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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 Pericles by William Shakespeare: [Exeunt all but Pericles.]
PERACLES.
How courtesy would seem to cover sin,
When what is done is like an hypocrite,
The which is good in nothing but in sight!
If it be true that I interpret false,
Then were it certain you were not so bad
As with foul incest to abuse your soul;
Where now you're both a father and a son,
By your untimely claspings with your child,
Which pleasure fits an husband, not a father;
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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 House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: he had recently heard and seen made these but too easy to fill
in. On the whole he was surprised; for though he had perceived
that the situation contained all the elements of an explosion, he
had often enough, in the range of his personal experience, seen
just such combinations subside into harmlessness. Still, Dorset's
spasmodic temper, and his wife's reckless disregard of
appearances, gave the situation a peculiar insecurity; and it was
less from the sense of any special relation to the case than from
a purely professional zeal, that Selden resolved to guide the
pair to safety. Whether, in the present instance, safety for
either lay in repairing so damaged a tie, it was no business of
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