| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: of Plato. The other testimonies to the voyages of Plato to Sicily and the
court of Dionysius are all of them later by several centuries than the
events to which they refer. No extant writer mentions them older than
Cicero and Cornelius Nepos. It does not seem impossible that so attractive
a theme as the meeting of a philosopher and a tyrant, once imagined by the
genius of a Sophist, may have passed into a romance which became famous in
Hellas and the world. It may have created one of the mists of history,
like the Trojan war or the legend of Arthur, which we are unable to
penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in that of Diogenes
Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the
personality of Plato,--more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: enter the medical profession. At the present day scores of women prepare
to enter it yearly without attracting any general attention; not that the
change which is going on is not far more in volume and social importance,
but that, having overcome the first obstruction, it is now noiseless.)
Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns of a bygone generation and the most
typical of modern women, there exists no greater gap (probably not so great
a one) as that which exists between the Tom Joneses and Squire Westerns of
that day and the most typical of entirely modern men.
The sexual and social ideals which dominated the fox-hunting, hard-
drinking, high-playing, recklessly loose-living country squire, clergyman,
lawyer, and politician who headed the social organism of the past, are at
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