| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, enlisted in
the sportsmen's battalion. He was wounded, and then the
authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with
a commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance,
out of the firing line. To which he always returns whenever he
can get a visitor to take with him as an excuse. He now stood
up, fairly high and clear, explaining casually that the Germans
were no longer firing, and showed me the points of interest.
I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my
chin. The skyline, the last skyline before the British could
look down on Bapaume, showed a mangy wood and a ruined village,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the
environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self,
can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the
whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of
looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural,
removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather
to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of
something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and
never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.[70]
These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but
undoubtedly the northern tone in religion has inclined to the
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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 Walking by Henry David Thoreau: for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and
that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as
wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his
pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know
that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and
quadrupeds--which, in some instances, is known to have affected
the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious
movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the
broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail
Walking |
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 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: "To him that lives well," answered the hermit, "every form of life
is good; nor can I give any other rule for choice than to remove
all apparent evil."
"He will most certainly remove from evil," said the Prince, "who
shall devote himself to that solitude which you have recommended by
your example."
"I have indeed lived fifteen years in solitude," said the hermit,
"but have no desire that my example should gain any imitators. In
my youth I professed arms, and was raised by degrees to the highest
military rank. I have traversed wide countries at the head of my
troops, and seen many battles and sieges. At last, being disgusted
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