| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: sorry to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart;
still capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the
end of his long life, having had much power with the public, being
plagued in some serious matter by a reference to "public opinion,"
uttered the impatient exclamation, "The public is just a great
baby!" And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects
of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods of
reading, is that, the more I see of our national faults or miseries,
the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish
illiterateness and want of education in the most ordinary habits of
thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dulness of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: oddly exercising the faculty of invention upon the spe-
ciality of the clever Jacquet Droz, the designer of auto-
matic substitutes for human limbs.
By the aid of the Casterbridge aurora, and by feeling
with her hands, the woman selected two sticks from the
heaps. These sticks were nearly straight to the height
of three or four feet, where each branched into a fork
like the letter Y. She sat down, snapped off the small
upper twigs, and carried the remainder with her into
the road. She placed one of these forks under each
arm as a crutch, tested them, timidly threw her whole
Far From the Madding Crowd |
| 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: alternation of opposites is replaced by this. And there have not been
wanting philosophers of the idealist school who have imagined that the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a theory of knowledge, and that
in what has preceded Plato is accommodating himself to the popular belief.
Such a view can only be elicited from the Phaedo by what may be termed the
transcendental method of interpretation, and is obviously inconsistent with
the Gorgias and the Republic. Those who maintain it are immediately
compelled to renounce the shadow which they have grasped, as a play of
words only. But the truth is, that Plato in his argument for the
immortality of the soul has collected many elements of proof or persuasion,
ethical and mythological as well as dialectical, which are not easily to be
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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 St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: young folks, and rolled about jovially from one to another, the
very picture of the general uncle.
It chanced that Flora had met Mr. Robbie in the course of the
afternoon. 'Now, Miss Flora,' he had said, 'come early, for I have
a Phoenix to show you - one Mr. Ducie, a new client of mine that, I
vow, I have fallen in love with'; and he was so good as to add a
word or two on my appearance, from which Flora conceived a
suspicion of the truth. She had come to the party, in consequence,
on the knife-edge of anticipation and alarm; had chosen a place by
the door, where I found her, on my arrival, surrounded by a posse
of vapid youths; and, when I drew near, sprang up to meet me in the
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