| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: had come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner
of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way -- but
West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were
the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about
the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of
reanimating the dead.
West’s last quarters were in a venerable
house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds
in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically
aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial
period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very
Herbert West: Reanimator |
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 Charmides by Plato: spirit of Aristotle, how can there be a knowledge of knowledge, and even if
attainable, how can such a knowledge be of any use?
The difficulty of the Charmides arises chiefly from the two senses of the
word (Greek), or temperance. From the ethical notion of temperance, which
is variously defined to be quietness, modesty, doing our own business, the
doing of good actions, the dialogue passes onto the intellectual conception
of (Greek), which is declared also to be the science of self-knowledge, or
of the knowledge of what we know and do not know, or of the knowledge of
good and evil. The dialogue represents a stage in the history of
philosophy in which knowledge and action were not yet distinguished. Hence
the confusion between them, and the easy transition from one to the other.
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