| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Disputation of the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences by Dr. Martin Luther: 1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam
agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be
repentance.
2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance,
i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by
the priests.
3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no
inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers
mortifications of the flesh.
4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as
hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: cohesion and emerged from anarchy.
Plainly it is not for nothing that nations have always displayed
intolerance in the defence of their opinions. This intolerance,
open as it is to criticism from the philosophic standpoint,
represents in the life of a people the most necessary of virtues.
It was to found or uphold general beliefs that so many victims
were sent to the stake in the Middle Ages and that so many
inventors and innovators have died in despair even if they have
escaped martyrdom. It is in defence, too, of such beliefs that
the world has been so often the scene of the direst disorder, and
that so many millions of men have died on the battlefield, and
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