| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: connection with the first. We can easily conceive this state by
thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are
sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact. Our reason
shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is
almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what
the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon.
A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the
objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind,
though they most often have only a very distant relation with the
observed fact.
The ways in which a crowd perverts any event of which it is a
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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 Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: He will come to G- and have an interview with your nephew. Then he
will have to use his own judgment as to the next steps, and as to
how far he may go in opposition to what has been done by the police
there."
"And then I may go back home?" asked Miss Graumann. "Go home with
the assurance that you will help my poor boy?"
"Yes, you may depend on us, Madam. Is there anything we can do for
you here? Are you alone in the city?"
"No, thank you. There is a friend here who will take care of me.
She will put me on the afternoon express back to G-."
"It is very likely that I will take that train myself," said Muller.
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