| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare: This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray;
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd.
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have,
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you:
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
The Taming of the Shrew |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare: Albany and Cornwall; next, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, with
Followers.
Lear. Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.
Glou. I shall, my liege.
Exeunt [Gloucester and Edmund].
Lear. Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.
Give me the map there. Know we have divided
In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths while we
Unburthen'd crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall,
King Lear |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: Atomic Theory, the fundamental idea of which is, in my opinion,
perfectly secure. The objection of Faraday to Dalton might be urged
with the same substantial force against Newton: it might be stated
with regard to the planetary motions that the laws of Kepler
revealed the facts; that the introduction of the principle of
gravitation was an addition to the facts. But this is the essence
of all theory. The theory is the backward guess from fact to
principle; the conjecture, or divination regarding something, which
lies behind the facts, and from which they flow in necessary
sequence. If Dalton's theory, then, account for the definite
proportions observed in the combinations of chemistry, its
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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 The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: Beauseant quite understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity
be her enemy, and that she would try to draw Gaston from his
unhallowed and immoral way of life. The Marquise de Beauseant would
willingly have sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she
could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M.
de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy
estate, where he was making plantations and improvements. She would
not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women
always wish for their husbands, and even for their lovers.
A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a
rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the
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