| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: together one upon another. The water, taking a mighty leap, is broken
into a hundred falls, dashed to spray on the boulders; it sparkles in
a myriad jets against a mass that has fallen from the heights that
tower over the ravine exactly in the middle of the road that has been
so irresistibly cut by the most formidable of active forces.
If you have formed a clear idea of this landscape, you will see in
those sleeping waters the image of Emilio's love for the Duchess, and
in the cascades leaping like a flock of sheep, an idea of his passion
shared with la Tinti. In the midst of his torrent of love a rock stood
up against which the torrent broke. The Prince, like Sisyphus, was
constantly under the stone.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: manner."[19] This therefore may almost be considered as their
expression of hunger. Mr. Bartlett informs me that the Flamingo
and the Kagu (_Rhinochetus jubatus_) when anxious to be fed,
beat the ground with their feet in the same odd manner.
So again Kingfishers, when they catch a fish, always beat
it until it is killed; and in the Zoological Gardens they
always beat the raw meat, with which they are sometimes fed,
before devouring it.
We have now, I think, sufficiently shown the truth of our first Principle,
namely, that when any sensation, desire, dislike, &c., has led during
a long series of generations to some voluntary movement, then a tendency
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been
by social position, to fill the part of a propounder of
accredited dogma.
Strange that his first aspiration--towards academical proficiency--
had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration--
towards apostleship--had also been checked by a woman. "Is it,"
he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system
of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish
domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back those who want
to progress?"
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble,
Jude the Obscure |
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 A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: exultant Livingston. Bonaparte, instead of establishing an outpost of
autocracy at New Orleans, sold to us not only the small piece of land
which we had originally in mind, but the huge piece of land whose
dimensions I have given above. We paid him fifteen millions for nearly a
million square miles. The formal transfer was made on December 17 of that
same year, 1803. There is my second jackstraw.
Thus, twenty years after the first time in 1783, Great Britain stood
between us and the designs of another nation. To that other nation her
fleet was the deciding obstacle. England did not love us so much, but she
loved France so much less. For the same reasons which I have suggested
before, self-interest, behind which lay her democratic kinship with our
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