| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: were the minds and the imaginations which disbelieved in occult facts
and tales of the marvellous. The lover of the Comtesse de Saint-
Vallier, one of the daughters whom Louis XI. had in Dauphine by Madame
de Sassenage, however bold he might be in other respects, was likely
to think twice before he finally entered the house of a so-called
sorcerer.
The history of Maitre Cornelius Hoogworst will fully explain the
security which the silversmith inspired in the Comte de Saint-Vallier,
the terror of the countess, and the hesitation that now took
possession of the lover. But, in order to make the readers of this
nineteenth century understand how such commonplace events could 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 The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: concerning which the profoundest modern philosophy informs us
that the extent to which a society has learned to conform to it
is the test and gauge of the progress in civilization which that
society has achieved. The command "to love one another," to check
the barbarous impulses inherited from the pre-social state, while
giving free play to the beneficent impulses needful for the
ultimate attainment of social equilibrium,--or as Tennyson
phrases it, to "move upward, working out the beast, and letting
the ape and tiger die,"--was, in Lessing's view, the task set
before us by religion. The true religious feeling was thus, in
his opinion, what the author of "Ecce Homo" has finely termed
 The Unseen World and Other Essays |