| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: by no means gave to her countenance a melancholy expression,
owing to the brightness of her eyes.
Laughter is frequently employed in a forced manner to conceal or mask
some other state of mind, even anger. We often see persons laughing
in order to conceal their shame or shyness. When a person purses up
his mouth, as if to prevent the possibility of a smile, though there
is nothing to excite one, or nothing to prevent its free indulgence,
an affected, solemn, or pedantic expression is given; but of such hybrid
expressions nothing more need here be said. In the case of derision,
a real or pretended smile or laugh is often blended with the expression
proper to contempt, and this may pass into angry contempt or scorn.
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey: one morning Judkins presented himself before her in the
courtyard.
Thin, hard, burnt, bearded, with the dust and sage thick on him,
with his leather wrist-bands shining from use, and his boots worn
through on the stirrup side, he looked the rider of riders. He
wore two guns and carried a Winchester.
Jane greeted him with surprise and warmth, set meat and bread and
drink before him; and called Lassiter out to see him. The men
exchanged glances, and the meaning of Lassiter's keen inquiry and
Judkins's bold reply, both unspoken, was not lost upon Jane.
"Where's your hoss?" asked Lassiter, aloud.
Riders of the Purple Sage |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: century later include manifest forgeries. Even the value of the
Aristotelian authority is a good deal impaired by the uncertainty
concerning the date and authorship of the writings which are ascribed to
him. And several of the citations of Aristotle omit the name of Plato, and
some of them omit the name of the dialogue from which they are taken.
Prior, however, to the enquiry about the writings of a particular author,
general considerations which equally affect all evidence to the genuineness
of ancient writings are the following: Shorter works are more likely to
have been forged, or to have received an erroneous designation, than longer
ones; and some kinds of composition, such as epistles or panegyrical
orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: new moral conceptions, new methods of action are found permeating the minds
of the women of one generation, they will reappear in the ideals, moral
conceptions, methods of action of the men of thirty years hence; and the
idea that the males of a society can ever become permanently farther
removed from its females than the individual man is from the mother who
bore and reared him, is at variance with every law of human inheritance.
If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition,
and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they exist
today, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident.
Not merely is the Woman's Movement of our age not a sporadic and abnormal
growth, like a cancer bearing no organic relation to the development of the
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