| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: How to send my vessel sailing on beyond.
For I mean to grow a little as the dolly at the helm,
And the dolly I intend to come alive;
And with him beside to help me, it's a-sailing I shall go,
It's a-sailing on the water, when the jolly breezes blow
And the vessel goes a dive-dive-dive.
O it's then you'll see me sailing through the rushes and the reeds,
And you'll hear the water singing at the prow;
For beside the dolly sailor, I'm to voyage and explore,
To land upon the island where no dolly was before,
And to fire the penny cannon in the bow.
A Child's Garden of Verses |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from United States Declaration of Independence: He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection
and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns,
and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries
to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun
with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas
to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of
their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
United States Declaration of Independence |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: child's mind; we think it is good for him to overcome obstacles."
"Of course it is," she unexpectedly agreed. "All our children
do that--they love to."
That puzzled me again. If they loved to do it, how could it be
educational?
"Our theory is this," she went on carefully. "Here is a young
human being. The mind is as natural a thing as the body, a thing
that grows, a thing to use and enjoy. We seek to nourish, to
stimulate, to exercise the mind of a child as we do the body.
There are the two main divisions in education--you have those
of course?--the things it is necessary to know, and the things it
Herland |
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 Alcibiades I by Plato: Socrates answers, that they can teach Greek, but they cannot teach justice;
for they are agreed about the one, but they are not agreed about the other:
and therefore Alcibiades, who has admitted that if he knows he must either
have learned from a master or have discovered for himself the nature of
justice, is convicted out of his own mouth.
Alcibiades rejoins, that the Athenians debate not about what is just, but
about what is expedient; and he asserts that the two principles of justice
and expediency are opposed. Socrates, by a series of questions, compels
him to admit that the just and the expedient coincide. Alcibiades is thus
reduced to the humiliating conclusion that he knows nothing of politics,
even if, as he says, they are concerned with the expedient.
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