| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: Inn Fields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinking
about sparrows and colors, until, almost at the end of the meeting,
her old convictions had all come back to her. But they had only come
back, she thought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted to
use them to fight against Ralph. They weren't, rightly speaking,
convictions at all. She could not see the world divided into separate
compartments of good people and bad people, any more than she could
believe so implicitly in the rightness of her own thought as to wish
to bring the population of the British Isles into agreement with it.
She looked at the lemon-colored leaflet, and thought almost enviously
of the faith which could find comfort in the issue of such documents;
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: creator of the world within. The separate senses furnish it with
material, but to it alone is due the building of our castles, on
premises of fact or in the air. For there is no impassable gulf
between the two. Coleridge's distinction that imagination drew
possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself, except as a
classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is only
the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of
relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to
rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in
his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably
escaped unhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments
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