| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: after the man is dead, will you not admit that the more lasting must also
survive during the same period of time? Now I will ask you to consider
whether the objection, which, like Simmias, I will express in a figure, is
of any weight. The analogy which I will adduce is that of an old weaver,
who dies, and after his death somebody says:--He is not dead, he must be
alive;--see, there is the coat which he himself wove and wore, and which
remains whole and undecayed. And then he proceeds to ask of some one who
is incredulous, whether a man lasts longer, or the coat which is in use and
wear; and when he is answered that a man lasts far longer, thinks that he
has thus certainly demonstrated the survival of the man, who is the more
lasting, because the less lasting remains. But that, Simmias, as I would
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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 Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive -- a
frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there
was another -- our first -- whose exact fate we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton -- much better than
in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got an accident
victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes
with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed.
It had lost an arm -- if it had been a perfect body we might have
succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured
three more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion,
and one rather shivery thing -- it rose of itself and uttered
Herbert West: Reanimator |
