| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: dilapidated fort and a dirty settlement known as Lorenzo Marquez, where
the Portuguese kept a few soldiers, most of them coloured. I pass over
my troubles with the Customs, if such they could be called. Suffice it
to say that ultimately I succeeded in landing my goods, on which the
duty chargeable was apparently enormous. This I did by distributing
twenty-five English sovereigns among various officials, beginning with
the acting-governor and ending with a drunken black sweep who sat in a
kind of sentry box on the quay.
Early next morning the Seven Stars sailed again, because of some quarrel
with the officials, who threatened to seize her--I forget why. Her
destination was the East African ports and, I think, Madagascar, where a
Marie |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: to the truth than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which
the time had not yet come, could have accomplished.
There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers were subject,
and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be struggling--the
tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that pure abstraction is only
negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction the greater the
truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them--the
(Greek), as it was technically termed--began at once to appear. Two are
truer than three, one than two. The words 'being,' or 'unity,' or
essence,' or 'good,' became sacred to them. They did not see that they had
a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of words. They did not
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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 Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: New Jersey. I went about with him, considerable. We used to lay
around, warm afternoons, in the shade of a rock, on some meadow-
ground that was pretty high and out of the marshy slush of his
cranberry-farm, and there we used to talk about all kinds of
things, and smoke pipes. One day, says I -
"About how old might you be, Sandy?"
"Seventy-two."
"I judged so. How long you been in heaven?"
"Twenty-seven years, come Christmas."
"How old was you when you come up?"
"Why, seventy-two, of course."
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: But one would have thought, looking back through history, that the
Alexandrians were not the only philosophers guilty of this shameful act
of syncretism. Plato, one would have thought, was as great a sinner as
they. So were the Hindoos. In spite of all their logical and
metaphysical acuteness, they were, you will find, unable to get rid of
the notion that theological inquiries concerning Brahma, Atma, Creeshna,
were indissolubly mixed up with that same logic and metaphysic. The
Parsees could not separate questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd from
Kant's three great philosophic problems: What is Man?--What may be
known?--What should be done? Neither, indeed, could the earlier Greek
sages. Not one of them, of any school whatsoever--from the semi-mythic
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