| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Essays of Francis Bacon by Francis Bacon: forenoon and afternoon. Cast it also, that you may
have rooms, both for summer and winter; shady
for summer, and warm for winter. You shall have
sometimes fair houses so full of glass, that one can-
not tell where to become, to be out of the sun or
cold. For inbowed windows, I hold them of good
use (in cities, indeed, upright do better, in respect
of the uniformity towards the street); for they be
pretty retiring places for conference; and besides,
they keep both the wind and sun off; for that
which would strike almost through the room, doth
Essays of Francis Bacon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896, when the
writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India
in 1904, when she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think,
almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have
an individual beauty of their own, I thought they ought to be
published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter made me very
proud and very sad," she wrote. "Is it possible that I have
written verses that are 'filled with beauty,' and is it possible
that you really think them worthy of being given to the world?
You know how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual
little poems seem to be less than beautiful--I mean with that
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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 War in the Air by H. G. Wells: again. It appeared Butteridge had died suddenly, very suddenly.
"And his secret, sir, perished with him! When they came to look
for the parts--none could find them. He had hidden them all too
well."
"But couldn't he tell?" asked the man in the straw hat. "Did he
die so suddenly as that?"
"Struck down, sir. Rage and apoplexy. At a place called
Dymchurch in England."
"That's right, said Laurier. "I remember a page about it in the
Sunday American. At the time they said it was a German spy had
stolen his balloon."
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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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: higher orders (of predecessors, of the constitution, of justice,
of the law, or of God himself), or they even justify themselves
by maxims from the current opinions of the herd, as "first
servants of their people," or "instruments of the public weal".
On the other hand, the gregarious European man nowadays assumes
an air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable, he
glorifies his qualities, such as public spirit, kindness,
deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy,
by virtue of which he is gentle, endurable, and useful to the
herd, as the peculiarly human virtues. In cases, however, where
it is believed that the leader and bell-wether cannot be
Beyond Good and Evil |
