| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: compound of agastos and thoos, and probably thoos may be further
resolvable. But if we take a word of which no further resolution seems
attainable, we may fairly conclude that we have reached one of these
original elements, and the truth of such a word must be tested by some new
method. Will you help me in the search?
All names, whether primary or secondary, are intended to show the nature of
things; and the secondary, as I conceive, derive their significance from
the primary. But then, how do the primary names indicate anything? And
let me ask another question,--If we had no faculty of speech, how should we
communicate with one another? Should we not use signs, like the deaf and
dumb? The elevation of our hands would mean lightness--heaviness would be
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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 War and the Future by H. G. Wells: mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of Europeans.
There is a very widespread disposition to treat America lightly
and contemptuously, to believe that America, as one man put it to
me recently, "hasn't the heart to do anything great or the guts
to do anything wicked." There is a strong undercurrent of
hostility therefore to the idea of America having any voice
whatever in the final settlement after the war. It is not for a
British writer to analyse the appearance that have thus affected
American world prestige. I am telling what I have observed.
Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.
X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain
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