| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: and she may be already entering into immortality as the
heroine of one of Auerbach's novels, for all I know.
We shall see, for if he puts her in I shall recognize her
by her Black Forest clothes, and her burned complexion,
her plump figure, her fat hands, her dull expression,
her gentle spirit, her generous feet, her bonnetless head,
and the plaited tails of hemp-colored hair hanging down
her back.
The house was big enough for a hotel; it was a hundred
feet long and fifty wide, and ten feet high, from ground
to eaves; but from the eaves to the comb of the mighty roof
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: destruction of the visible universe."
Pursuing this teleological argument, it is suggested that perhaps
this apparent waste of energy is "only an arrangement in virtue
of which our universe keeps up a memory of the past at the
expense of the present, inasmuch as all memory consists in an
investiture of present resources in order to keep a hold upon the
past." Recourse is had to the ingenious argument in which Mr.
Babbage showed that "if we had power to follow and detect the
minutest effects of any disturbance, each particle of existing
matter must be a register of all that has happened. The track of
every canoe, of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
