| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: Bessie Bell looked and thought, but she could not tell just exactly
what this lady was.
It was best that she should ask, and then she would surely know.
So she asked: ``Are vou a Lady, ma'am?''
``I hope so, little girl,'' the lady said.
``I thought, maybe, you were a Sister,'' said Bessie Bell.
``No,'' said the lady.
``Like Sister Mary Felice, and Sister Angela, and Sister Helen
Vincula,'' said Bessie Bell.
``No,'' said the lady.
``Are you a Mama, then?'' asked Bessie Bell.
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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 Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: and, as for lubbers, we're no more lubbers than you. Let's have a
look at the lad."
And he flapped right into Tom's face, and stared at him in the most
impudent way (for the mollys are audacious fellows, as all whalers
know), and then asked him where he hailed from, and what land he
sighted last.
And, when Tom told him, he seemed pleased, and said he was a good
plucked one to have got so far.
"Come along, lads," he said to the rest, "and give this little chap
a cast over the pack, for Mother Carey's sake. We've eaten blubber
enough for to-day, and we'll e'en work out a bit of our time by
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: Ragons had been faithful adherents of the Royalist cause; it was
through their means that the Vendean leaders kept up a correspondence
with the Princes and the Royalist Committee in Paris. The abbe, in the
ordinary dress of the time, was standing on the threshold of the shop
--which stood between Saint Roch and the Rue des Frondeurs--when he
saw that the Rue Saint Honore was filled with a crowd and he could not
go out.
"What is the matter?" he asked Madame Ragon.
"Nothing," she said; "it is only the tumbril cart and the executioner
going to the Place Louis XV. Ah! we used to see it often enough last
year; but to-day, four days after the anniversary of the twenty-first
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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 Sophist by Plato: mechanics, when we can no further go we arrive at chemistry--when chemistry
becomes organic we arrive at physiology: when we pass from the outward and
animal to the inward nature of man we arrive at moral and metaphysical
philosophy. These sciences have each of them their own methods and are
pursued independently of one another. But to the mind of the thinker they
are all one--latent in one another--developed out of one another.
This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the
solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls
within which the human mind was confined. Formerly when philosophers
arrived at the infinite and absolute, they seemed to be lost in a region
beyond human comprehension. But Hegel has shown that the absolute and
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