| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: twice as long without repetitions, and I am not at all sure that
in choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not
omit much which could with advantage be substituted for
what is here set down. There is nothing here of my talk with
the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the
officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of
the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the desperate
situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from
abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at
home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded
on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the
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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: attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in
other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the
characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic
feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes
as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter
peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite
phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as
prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance.
When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there
may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may
have no significance for the subject's usual inner life, to
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