| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: they are broken with fatigue" owing to the exertions which he has
demanded from them.]
34. When an army feeds its horses with grain and kills its
cattle for food,
[In the ordinary course of things, the men would be fed on
grain and the horses chiefly on grass.]
and when the men do not hang their cooking-pots over the camp-
fires, showing that they will not return to their tents, you may
know that they are determined to fight to the death.
[I may quote here the illustrative passage from the HOU HAN
SHU, ch. 71, given in abbreviated form by the P`EI WEN YUN FU:
The Art of War |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: faithful to his word--faithful to his word!"
Repeating that last sentence in her thoughts, she trembled violently,
and remained as if stupefied.
To understand the horror of her present situation, we must add that
this nocturnal scene took place in 1591, a period when civil war raged
throughout France, and the laws had no vigor. The excesses of the
League, opposed to the accession of Henri IV., surpassed the
calamities of the religious wars. License was so universal that no one
was surprised to see a great lord kill his enemy in open day. When a
military expedition, having a private object, was led in the name of
the King or of the League, one or other of these parties applauded it.
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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 Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: of the voyagers, snuffing up the smoke from the palace kitchen,
ridiculed the idea of returning to the vessel. One of them
(more brutal than his fellows, and the most notorious
gormandizer in the crew) said such a cruel and wicked thing,
that I wonder the mere thought did not turn him into a wild
beast, in shape, as he already was in his nature.
"This troublesome and impertinent little fowl," said he, "would
make a delicate titbit to begin dinner with. Just one plump
morsel, melting away between the teeth. If he comes within my
reach, I'll catch him, and give him to the palace cook to be
roasted on a skewer."
Tanglewood Tales |
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 Theaetetus by Plato: and the reason; and connected with this, at a higher stage of development,
the opposition of moral and intellectual virtue; also the primitive
conceptions of unity, being, rest, motion, and the like. These divisions
were not really scientific, but rather based on popular experience. They
were not held with the precision of modern thinkers, but taken all together
they gave a new existence to the mind in thought, and greatly enlarged and
more accurately defined man's knowledge of himself and of the world. The
majority of them have been accepted by Christian and Western nations. Yet
in modern times we have also drifted so far away from Aristotle, that if we
were to frame a system on his lines we should be at war with ordinary
language and untrue to our own consciousness. And there have been a few
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