| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: in miniature. Of all so-called dancing in the South Seas, that
which I saw in Butaritari stands easily the first. The HULA, as it
may be viewed by the speedy globe-trotter in Honolulu, is surely
the most dull of man's inventions, and the spectator yawns under
its length as at a college lecture or a parliamentary debate. But
the Gilbert Island dance leads on the mind; it thrills, rouses,
subjugates; it has the essence of all art, an unexplored imminent
significance. Where so many are engaged, and where all must make
(at a given moment) the same swift, elaborate, and often arbitrary
movement, the toil of rehearsal is of course extreme. But they
begin as children. A child and a man may often be seen together in
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: hereafter to your justice."
"Sir," replied Anne, with a degree of haughtiness which to
certain persons became impertinence, "this is the reason
that you trouble me in the midst of so many absorbing
concerns! an affair for the police! Well, sir, you ought to
know that we no longer have a police, since we are no longer
at Paris."
"I think your majesty will have no need to apply to the
police to know where my friends are, but that if you will
deign to interrogate the cardinal he can reply without any
further inquiry than into his own recollections."
Twenty Years After |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: chapter of its age--was deposited unostentatiously on the
writing-table placed between two windows. It didn't occur to me
to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my
eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass
handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up
festally the room which had waited so many years for the
wandering nephew. The blinds were down.
Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the
first peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal
grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession
of a member of the family; and beyond the village in the
Some Reminiscences |
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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: consciousness of results of which it is not easy to demonstrate
any prolonged subconscious incubation. Some of the cases I used
to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture III
were of this order (compare pages 59, 60, 61, 66); and we
shall see other experiences of the kind when we come to the
subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M.
Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of
saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way.
The result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely
physiological nerve storm, a "discharging lesion" like that of
epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two
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