| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: yours, barring your initial question, meant absolutely nothing.
She understood you perfectly from the first, and you knew she did;
but then, if all of us were to say only what were necessary, the
delightful art of conversation would soon be nothing but a science.
The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his
Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces
personalities. With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present
regard for others is substituted in its stead.
A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this
courtesy; it is also its cause.
That politeness should be one of the most marked results of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: liberty, and as the rulers have a great deal to lose order is to
them a first-rate consideration. In like manner an aristocracy
protects the people from the excesses of despotism, because it
always possesses an organized power ready to resist a despot.
But a democracy without provincial institutions has no security
against these evils. How can a populace, unaccustomed to freedom
in small concerns, learn to use it temperately in great affairs?
What resistance can be offered to tyranny in a country where
every private individual is impotent, and where the citizens are
united by no common tie? Those who dread the license of the mob,
and those who fear the rule of absolute power, ought alike to
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