| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: nothing WITHIN to respond to them.' The ego [here] is wholly
identified with the higher centres whose quality of feeling is
that of withinness. Another of the respondents says: 'Since
then, although Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of
brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.'"
--Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur
in the cerebral organ. But on the side accessible to
introspection, their causal condition is nothing but the degree
of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high and strong as to
be sovereign, and it must be frankly confessed that we do not
know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person
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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 Philebus by Plato: right, but one of the highest and noblest motives by which human nature can
be animated. Neither in referring actions to the test of utility have we
to make a laborious calculation, any more than in trying them by other
standards of morals. For long ago they have been classified sufficiently
for all practical purposes by the thinker, by the legislator, by the
opinion of the world. Whatever may be the hypothesis on which they are
explained, or which in doubtful cases may be applied to the regulation of
them, we are very rarely, if ever, called upon at the moment of performing
them to determine their effect upon the happiness of mankind.
There is a theory which has been contrasted with Utility by Paley and
others--the theory of a moral sense: Are our ideas of right and wrong
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