| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: nature of love, and no order in the topics (being in these respects far
inferior to the second); while the third of them is found (though a fancy
of the hour) to be framed upon real dialectical principles. But dialectic
is not rhetoric; nothing on that subject is to be found in the endless
treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard names. When Plato has
sufficiently put them to the test of ridicule he touches, as with the point
of a needle, the real error, which is the confusion of preliminary
knowledge with creative power. No attainments will provide the speaker
with genius; and the sort of attainments which can alone be of any value
are the higher philosophy and the power of psychological analysis, which is
given by dialectic, but not by the rules of the rhetoricians.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard: called a beach. It is left quite bare at low tide, and serves
as a repository for all the filth, offal, and refuse of the town.
Here it is, too, that the women come to bury coconuts in the
mud, leaving them there till the outer husk is quite rotten,
when they dig them up again and use the fibres to make mats with,
and for various other purposes. As this process has been going
on for generations, the condition of the shore can be better
imagined than described. I have smelt many evil odours in the
course of my life, but the concentrated essence of stench which
arose from that beach at Lamu as we sat in the moonlit night
-- not under, but on our friend the Consul's hospitable roof
Allan Quatermain |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: knowledge of truth, than I might, perhaps, have made had I been engaged in
the perusal of books merely, or in holding converse with men of letters.
These nine years passed away, however, before I had come to any
determinate judgment respecting the difficulties which form matter of
dispute among the learned, or had commenced to seek the principles of any
philosophy more certain than the vulgar. And the examples of many men of
the highest genius, who had, in former times, engaged in this inquiry,
but, as appeared to me, without success, led me to imagine it to be a work
of so much difficulty, that I would not perhaps have ventured on it so
soon had I not heard it currently rumored that I had already completed
the inquiry. I know not what were the grounds of this opinion; and, if my
Reason Discourse |
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 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text,
and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of
the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to her mother's, and for a
few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker
Street.
"Why," said I, glancing up at my companion, "that was surely the
bell. Who could come to-night? Some friend of yours, perhaps?"
"Except yourself I have none," he answered. "I do not encourage
visitors."
"A client, then?"
"If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man out
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
