| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: once attributed to abstractions is now attached to the words which are the
signs of them. The philosophy which in the first and second generation was
a great and inspiring effort of reflection, in the third becomes
sophistical, verbal, eristic.
It is this stage of philosophy which Plato satirises in the Euthydemus.
The fallacies which are noted by him appear trifling to us now, but they
were not trifling in the age before logic, in the decline of the earlier
Greek philosophies, at a time when language was first beginning to perplex
human thought. Besides he is caricaturing them; they probably received
more subtle forms at the hands of those who seriously maintained them.
They are patent to us in Plato, and we are inclined to wonder how any one
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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 Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum: the front ranks, so he could see what was going on; but as he faced
Ozma and her friends the Scarecrow, as if aroused to action by the
valor of the private, drew one of Billina's eggs from his right jacket
pocket and hurled it straight at the little monarch's head.
It struck him squarely in his left eye, where the egg smashed and
scattered, as eggs will, and covered his face and hair and beard with
its sticky contents.
"Help, help!" screamed the King, clawing with his fingers at the egg,
in a struggle to remove it.
"An egg! an egg! Run for your lives!" shouted the captain of the
Nomes, in a voice of horror.
Ozma of Oz |
