| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: And thrice again let slack the string at leisure;
But wrath prevailed at last, the reed outflew,
For love finds mean, but hatred knows no measure,
Outflew the shaft, but with the shaft, this charm,
This wish she sent: Heaven grant it do no harm:
LXIV
She bids the reed return the way it went,
And pierce her heart which so unkind could prove,
Such force had love, though lost and vainly spent,
What strength hath happy, kind and mutual love?
But she that gentle thought did straight repent,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: the generation of heat, whiteness, or anything else, in some such manner as
the following:--were they not saying that each of them is moving between
the agent and the patient, together with a perception, and that the patient
ceases to be a perceiving power and becomes a percipient, and the agent a
quale instead of a quality? I suspect that quality may appear a strange
and uncouth term to you, and that you do not understand the abstract
expression. Then I will take concrete instances: I mean to say that the
producing power or agent becomes neither heat nor whiteness but hot and
white, and the like of other things. For I must repeat what I said before,
that neither the agent nor patient have any absolute existence, but when
they come together and generate sensations and their objects, the one
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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 Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: remarkable for the dryness and poverty of its soil.
Now, while undoubtedly in these passages we may recognise the first
anticipation of many of the most modern principles of research, we
must remember how essentially limited is the range of the
ARCHAEOLOGIA, and how no theory at all is offered on the wider
questions of the general conditions of the rise and progress of
humanity, a problem which is first scientifically discussed in the
REPUBLIC of Plato.
And at the outset it must be premised that, while the study of
primitive man is an essentially inductive science, resting rather
on the accumulation of evidence than on speculation, among the
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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 Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis: And his little cheeks crimson as beets,
Your acolyte, perfume-dispenser,
Is sweet as a page out of Keats,
"But tell me, my Dea -- my Psyche! --
(With your wings outspread as to race
With that swift and acephalous Nike
Who lost her bean somewhere in Thrace) --
"My Thea -- my classical pigeon! --
Is not your Sincerity shocked
By this giddy revue of religion? . . .
Are none of these gods being mocked? . . .
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