| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: his theory. But let us at once admit that the German, unfortunately,
compromised his splendid discovery by enormous pecuniary claims.
Mesmer was defeated by the doubtfulness of facts, by universal
ignorance of the part played in nature by imponderable fluids then
unobserved, and by his own inability to study on all sides a science
possessing a triple front. Magnetism has many applications; in
Mesmer's hands it was, in its relation to the future, merely what
cause is to effect. But, if the discoverer lacked genius, it is a sad
thing both for France and for human reason to have to say that a
science contemporaneous with civilization, cultivated by Egypt and
Chaldea, by Greece and India, met in Paris in the eighteenth century
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: flower-garden--this year the flowers were planted in front of the
steward's house--over the tennis ground, now overgrown with
dandelions, and along the lime-tree walk, where he used to smoke
his cigar, and where he had flirted with the pretty Kirimova, his
mother's visitor. Having briefly prepared in his mind the speech
he was going to make to the peasants, he again went in to the
steward, and, after tea, having once more arranged his thoughts,
he went into the room prepared for him in the big house, which
used to be a spare bedroom.
In this clean little room, with pictures of Venice on the walls,
and a mirror between the two windows, there stood a clean bed
Resurrection |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: say that the theory itself is hardly presentable in any tangible
form to the intellect. Faraday looks, and rightly looks, into the
heart of the decomposing body itself; he sees, and rightly sees,
active within it the forces which produce the decomposition, and he
rejects, and rightly rejects, the notion of external attraction;
but beyond the hypothesis of decompositions and recompositions,
enunciated and developed by Grothuss and Davy, he does not, I think,
help us to any definite conception as to how the force reaches the
decomposing mass and acts within it. Nor, indeed, can this be done,
until we know the true physical process which underlies what we call
an electric current.
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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 The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: tight, and then I shall hurl it as far out into the sea as my
strength will permit. The wind is off-shore; the tide is running
out; perhaps it will be carried into one of those numerous
ocean-currents which sweep perpetually from pole to pole and
from continent to continent, to be deposited at last upon some
inhabited shore. If fate is kind and this does happen, then, for
God's sake, come and get me!
It was a week ago that I wrote the preceding paragraph, which I
thought would end the written record of my life upon Caprona.
I had paused to put a new point on my quill and stir the crude ink
(which I made by crushing a black variety of berry and mixing it
The Land that Time Forgot |
