| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: education of the youths? He is of the same deme with you, and is always
passing his time in places where the youth have any noble study or pursuit,
such as you are enquiring after.
LYSIMACHUS: Why, Laches, has Socrates ever attended to matters of this
sort?
LACHES: Certainly, Lysimachus.
NICIAS: That I have the means of knowing as well as Laches; for quite
lately he supplied me with a teacher of music for my sons,--Damon, the
disciple of Agathocles, who is a most accomplished man in every way, as
well as a musician, and a companion of inestimable value for young men at
their age.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: It was not often that he thought. On patrol and sitting round camp fires
with the other men about him there was no time for it; and Peter Halket had
never been given to much thinking. He had been a careless boy at the
village school; and though, when he left, his mother paid the village
apothecary to read learned books with him at night on history and science,
he had not retained much of them. As a rule he lived in the world
immediately about him, and let the things of the moment impinge on him, and
fall off again as they would, without much reflection. But tonight on the
kopje he fell to thinking, and his thoughts shaped themselves into
connected chains.
He wondered first whether his mother would ever get the letter he had
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