| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: disproportionate, being double that of any other except IX. I do
not propose to draw any inferences from these facts, beyond the
general conclusion that Sun Tzu's work cannot have come down to
us in the shape in which it left his hands: chap. VIII is
obviously defective and probably out of place, while XI seems to
contain matter that has either been added by a later hand or
ought to appear elsewhere.]
51. For it is the soldier's disposition to offer an
obstinate resistance when surrounded, to fight hard when he
cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into
danger.
The Art of War |
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 Timaeus by Plato: great number of small bodies being combined into a few large ones, or the
converse. But three of them can be thus resolved and compounded, for they
all spring from one, and when the greater bodies are broken up, many small
bodies will spring up out of them and take their own proper figures; or,
again, when many small bodies are dissolved into their triangles, if they
become one, they will form one large mass of another kind. So much for
their passage into one another. I have now to speak of their several
kinds, and show out of what combinations of numbers each of them was
formed. The first will be the simplest and smallest construction, and its
element is that triangle which has its hypotenuse twice the lesser side.
When two such triangles are joined at the diagonal, and this is repeated
|
