| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: he had brought her home. Still, he was a little surprised that
her father's eagerness to send him for Grace should have resulted
in such an anticlimax as this.
He walked softly away into the lane towards his own house, looking
back when he reached the turning, from which he could get a last
glimpse of the timber-merchant's roof. He hazarded guesses as to
what Grace was saying just at that moment, and murmured, with some
self-derision, "nothing about me!" He looked also in the other
direction, and saw against the sky the thatched hip and solitary
chimney of Marty's cottage, and thought of her too, struggling
bravely along under that humble shelter, among her spar-gads and
The Woodlanders |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: that moment wore the lofty expression which a general may have when he
hears the first gun fired for a battle. He raised his eyes to heaven,
and left the room, saying to himself, "What a priest he would make!"
Eloquence is not at the Bar. The pleader rarely puts forth the real
powers of his soul; if he did, he would die of it in a few years.
Eloquence is, nowadays, rarely in the pulpit; but it is found on
certain occasions in the Chamber of Deputies, when an ambitious man
stakes all to win all, or, stung by a myriad darts, at a given moment
bursts into speech. But it is still more certainly found in some
privileged beings, at the inevitable hour when their claims must
either triumph or be wrecked, and when they are forced to speak. Thus
Albert Savarus |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: of sensation, we get into unmanageable difficulties. A great part
of the contents of our minds consists of sensuous (chiefly
visual) images, and though we may imagine reflection to go on
without further images supplied by vision or hearing, touch or
taste or smell, yet we cannot well see how fresh experiences
could be gained in such a state. The reader, if he require
further illustrations, can easily follow out this line of
thought. Enough has no doubt been said to convince him that our
hypothesis of the survival of conscious activity apart from
material conditions is not only utterly unsupported by any
evidence that can be gathered from the world of which we have
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
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 Protagoras by Plato: is bound to say "that wisdom and knowledge are the highest of human
things."'
There is no reason to suppose that in all this Plato is depicting an
imaginary Protagoras; he seems to be showing us the teaching of the
Sophists under the milder aspect under which he once regarded them. Nor is
there any reason to doubt that Socrates is equally an historical character,
paradoxical, ironical, tiresome, but seeking for the unity of virtue and
knowledge as for a precious treasure; willing to rest this even on a
calculation of pleasure, and irresistible here, as everywhere in Plato, in
his intellectual superiority.
The aim of Socrates, and of the Dialogue, is to show the unity of virtue.
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