| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: lived in daily anticipation of his triumphant return to the
earth. The end of all things being so near at hand, no attempt
was made to insure accurate and complete memoirs for the use of a
posterity which was destined, in Christian imagination, never to
arrive. The first Christians wrote but little; even Papias, at
the end of a century, preferring second-hand or third-hand oral
tradition to the written gospels which were then beginning to
come into circulation.[17] Memoirs of the life and teachings of
Jesus were called forth by the necessity of having a written
standard of doctrine to which to appeal amid the growing
differences of opinion which disturbed the Church. Thus the
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey: chastity of honor, which belonged so truly to many Indian chiefs!
The redmen were driven like hounded deer into the untrodden wilds. From
freemen of the forests, from owners of the great boundless plains, they passed
to stern, enduring fugitives on their own lands. Small wonder that they became
cruel where once they had been gentle! Stratagem and cunning, the night
assault, the daylight ambush took the place of their one-time open warfare.
Their chivalrous courage, that sublime inheritance from ancestors who had
never known the paleface foe, degenerated into a savage ferocity.
Interesting as was this history to Jim, he cared more for Glickhican's rich
portrayal of the redmen's domestic life, for the beautiful poetry of his
tradition and legends. He heard with delight the exquisite fanciful Indian
The Spirit of the Border |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: choose between them? 'I should say, Socrates, that the art of persuasion,
which gives freedom to all men, and to individuals power in the state, is
the greatest good.' But what is the exact nature of this persuasion?--is
the persevering retort: You could not describe Zeuxis as a painter, or
even as a painter of figures, if there were other painters of figures;
neither can you define rhetoric simply as an art of persuasion, because
there are other arts which persuade, such as arithmetic, which is an art of
persuasion about odd and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the
necessity of a further limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art
of persuading in the law courts, and in the assembly, about the just and
unjust. But still there are two sorts of persuasion: one which gives
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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 A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: exceeding shy and jealous of every one that came near them. Once,
on a public day, whether a Sabbath-day or not I do not remember, in
Aldgate Church, in a pew full of people, on a sudden one fancied she
smelt an ill smell. Immediately she fancies the plague was in the pew,
whispers her notion or suspicion to the next, then rises and goes out of
the pew. It immediately took with the next, and so to them all; and
every one of them, and of the two or three adjoining pews, got up and
went out of the church, nobody knowing what it was offended them,
or from whom.
This immediately filled everybody's mouths with one preparation or
other, such as the old woman directed, and some perhaps as
A Journal of the Plague Year |
