| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: the little Mermaid. And he drew back frowning, and having made the
sign of the cross, he cried aloud and said, 'I will not bless the
sea nor anything that is in it. Accursed be the Sea-folk, and
accursed be all they who traffic with them. And as for him who for
love's sake forsook God, and so lieth here with his leman slain by
God's judgment, take up his body and the body of his leman, and
bury them in the corner of the Field of the Fullers, and set no
mark above them, nor sign of any kind, that none may know the place
of their resting. For accursed were they in their lives, and
accursed shall they be in their deaths also.'
And the people did as he commanded them, and in the corner of the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: achieve successes never attempted by the cleverest of the clever.
Wellington was a completer realist than Napoleon. It was impossible
to persuade Wellington that he was beaten until he actually was
beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had understood the nature
of Wellington's strength instead of returning Wellington's snobbish
contempt for him by an academic contempt for Wellington, he would not
have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and D'Erlon, who, on that
field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas Wellington knew
precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffable would have
triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic soldier,
doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth) with
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: six o'clock in the evening, when all was ready for a start to pick
up these six miles, he comes and says there must be a fault about
thirty miles from Bona! By this time it was too late to begin
paying out today, and we must lie here moored in a thousand fathoms
till light to-morrow morning. The ship pitches a good deal, but
the wind is going down.
'June 13, Sunday.
'The wind has not gone down, however. It now (at 10.30) blows a
pretty stiff gale, the sea has also risen; and the ELBA'S bows rise
and fall about 9 feet. We make twelve pitches to the minute, and
the poor cable must feel very sea-sick by this time. We are quite
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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 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: attributed to the direct action of the conditions of life--as, in some
cases, increased size from amount of food, colour from particular kinds of
food and from light, and perhaps the thickness of fur from climate.
Habit also has a deciding influence, as in the period of flowering with
plants when transported from one climate to another. In animals it has a
more marked effect; for instance, I find in the domestic duck that the
bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion
to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild-duck; and I
presume that this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck
flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parent. The great and
inherited development of the udders in cows and goats in countries where
On the Origin of Species |
