| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "They lived in a great village in huts that were built of
stone and surrounded by a great wall. They were very fierce,
rushing out and falling upon our warriors before ever they
learned that their errand was a peaceful one. Our men were
few in number, but they held their own at the top of a little
rocky hill, until the fierce people went back at sunset into their
wicked city. Then our warriors came down from their hill,
and, after taking many ornaments of yellow metal from the
bodies of those they had slain, they marched back out of
the valley, nor have any of us ever returned.
"They are wicked people--neither white like you nor black
The Return of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: ones, say the Protagoras or Phaedrus with the Laws. Or who can be expected
to think in the same manner during a period of authorship extending over
above fifty years, in an age of great intellectual activity, as well as of
political and literary transition? Certainly not Plato, whose earlier
writings are separated from his later ones by as wide an interval of
philosophical speculation as that which separates his later writings from
Aristotle.
The dialogues which have been translated in the first Appendix, and which
appear to have the next claim to genuineness among the Platonic writings,
are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First
Alcibiades. Of these, the Lesser Hippias and the Funeral Oration are cited
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