| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few
horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the
expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm
my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could
even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could,
indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill
going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my
excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their
burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they taken my Time
Machine?
`So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into
The Time Machine |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: ``punishment is not inflicted for the benefit of the prisoner, but
for that of society,'' and secondly, with something of irony, that
``even for the sake of the abolition of capital punishment, and to
prevent a reaction in favour of this punishment, we must uphold
the right of shutting up for ever the few malefactors whose
release would be dangerous.''
It is entirely futile to consider the amendment of criminals as
opposed to imprisonment for life, when it is known that born
criminals, authors of the most serious crimes, for whom such
punishment is reserved, are precisely those whose amendment is
impossible, and that the moral sense attributed to them is only a
|
