| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: him just then was that he had been triumphantly returned for
Clockborough in the interest of the party that had swept the
country--so that I might easily have referred Mrs. Saltram to the
journals of the day. Yet when I at last wrote her that I was
coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing
her, I but remarked in regard to her question that she must really
put it to Miss Anvoy.
CHAPTER VI
I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its
consequences, on my return, had smartly to be faced. The season,
in London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: Du Bruel [uneasy]. "You wouldn't pardon such a thing yourself, I
know."
Bixiou [in a wheedling tone]. "To a friend? indeed I would." [They
hear Fleury's voice.] "There's Fleury cursing Baudoyer. Hey, how well
the thing has been managed! Baudoyer will get the appointment."
[Confidentially] "After all, so much the better. Du Bruel, just keep
your eye on the consequences. Rabourdin would be a mean-spirited
creature to stay under Baudoyer; he will send in his registration, and
that will give us two places. You can be head of the bureau and take
me for under-head-clerk. We will make vaudevilles together, and I'll
fag at your work in the office."
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he
had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose
life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a
tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and
fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times
affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the
rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep
natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did
therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of
superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring,
somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and
Moby Dick |
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 Philebus by Plato: To these ancient speculations the moderns have added a further question:--
'Whose pleasure? The pleasure of yourself, or of your neighbour,--of the
individual, or of the world?' This little addition has changed the whole
aspect of the discussion: the same word is now supposed to include two
principles as widely different as benevolence and self-love. Some modern
writers have also distinguished between pleasure the test, and pleasure the
motive of actions. For the universal test of right actions (how I know
them) may not always be the highest or best motive of them (why I do them).
Socrates, as we learn from the Memorabilia of Xenophon, first drew
attention to the consequences of actions. Mankind were said by him to act
rightly when they knew what they were doing, or, in the language of the
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