| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: knew nothing, should be declared by the oracle to be the wisest of men?
Reflecting upon the answer, he determined to refute it by finding 'a
wiser;' and first he went to the politicians, and then to the poets, and
then to the craftsmen, but always with the same result--he found that they
knew nothing, or hardly anything more than himself; and that the little
advantage which in some cases they possessed was more than counter-balanced
by their conceit of knowledge. He knew nothing, and knew that he knew
nothing: they knew little or nothing, and imagined that they knew all
things. Thus he had passed his life as a sort of missionary in detecting
the pretended wisdom of mankind; and this occupation had quite absorbed him
and taken him away both from public and private affairs. Young men of the
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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 Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: rate of eight per cent. a year. Within twelve years Wall Street
would own everything in the world, and mankind would be left
naked and starving.
The wildest book of all was called Caesar's Column. It was in
the form of a novel and told how the rich in America worshiped
gold and lust instead of God and brotherly love, and how they
drove their carriages over the working man's children and left
them crushed and bleeding in the street. America had ceased to be
a republic and was an oligarchy of wealth all owned by a dozen
great families while the millions were starving. The end of the
book described a great revolution in which the people arose, led
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