| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: as many of them, at least, as were not required for purposes of
business; and then determined to prevent suspicion by a bold move;
she started off to Stow, and told Lady Grenville a most pathetic
tale: how her husband had gone out to pollock fishing, and never
returned: but how she had heard horsemen gallop past her window in
the dead of night, and was sure they must have been the Jesuits,
and that they had carried off her old man by main force, and
probably, after making use of his services, had killed and salted
him down for provision on their voyage back to the Pope at Rome;
after which she ended by entreating protection against those
"Popish skulkers up to Chapel," who were sworn to do her a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: If there be an object to HURRY any of you in hot haste to a step
which you would never take DELIBERATELY, that object will be
frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated
by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied, still have the
old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point,
the laws of your own framing under it; while the new administration
will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either.
If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the
right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason
for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity,
and a firm reliance on him who has never yet forsaken this favored land,
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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 Theaetetus by Plato: level of bodily ones, or to confound one with the other.
g. That the progress of Physiology may throw a new light on Psychology is
a dream in which scientific men are always tempted to indulge. But however
certain we may be of the connexion between mind and body, the explanation
of the one by the other is a hidden place of nature which has hitherto been
investigated with little or no success.
h. The impossibility of distinguishing between mind and body. Neither in
thought nor in experience can we separate them. They seem to act together;
yet we feel that we are sometimes under the dominion of the one, sometimes
of the other, and sometimes, both in the common use of language and in
fact, they transform themselves, the one into the good principle, the other
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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 Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: sailors there were also some of the artificers themselves who
felt no such scruples, and in this way these difficulties were
the more easily surmounted. In matters where life is in
danger it becomes necessary to treat even unfounded prejudices
with tenderness, as an accident, under certain circumstances,
would not only have been particularly painful to those giving
directions, but have proved highly detrimental to the work,
especially in the early stages of its advancement.
At four o'clock fifty-eight persons landed; but the tides
being extremely languid, the water only left the higher parts
of the rock, and no work could be done at the site of the
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