| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: relieving lightness of a few water-colour sketches of fruit and
flower.
The reception chamber was fitted in a simple but elegant style. Its
arrangement suggested nothing of the fact that on the morrow the room
would again be cleared and abandoned to the dust and the spider. The
entrance hall was imposing with palms and ferns and the light of an
immense candelabrum.
At seven o'clock Grandemont, in evening dress, with pearls--a family
passion--in his spotless linen, emerged from somewhere. The
invitations had specified eight as the dining hour. He drew an
armchair upon the porch, and sat there, smoking cigarettes and half
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: was a time when the human mind was only with great difficulty disentangled
from such fallacies.
To appreciate fully the drift of the Euthydemus, we should imagine a mental
state in which not individuals only, but whole schools during more than one
generation, were animated by the desire to exclude the conception of rest,
and therefore the very word 'this' (Theaet.) from language; in which the
ideas of space, time, matter, motion, were proved to be contradictory and
imaginary; in which the nature of qualitative change was a puzzle, and even
differences of degree, when applied to abstract notions, were not
understood; in which there was no analysis of grammar, and mere puns or
plays of words received serious attention; in which contradiction itself
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