| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: rest, were you ordained. But the boon I crave is that you do endow a
great playhouse, or, if I may make bold to coin a scholarly name for
it, a National Theatre, for the better instruction and gracing of your
Majesty's subjects.
ELIZABETH. Why, sir, are there not theatres enow on the Bankside and
in Blackfriars?
SHAKESPEAR. Madam: these are the adventures of needy and desperate
men that must, to save themselves from perishing of want, give the
sillier sort of people what they best like; and what they best like,
God knows, is not their own betterment and instruction, as we well see
by the example of the churches, which must needs compel men to
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: had never yet been able to bring himself to say that he was glad
that they were going to be married. He saw their faults so clearly,
and the inferior nature of a great deal of their feeling for
each other, and he expected that their love would not last.
He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used
to thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him
with a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces
of pity also. What, after all, did people's faults matter in comparison
with what was good in them? He resolved that he would now tell them
what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just
as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road.
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: something conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter,
and talking of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or
electricity, or force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the
accidents of brute matter, and a part of that nature which is born to
die.
The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus. The
unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and
Iamblichus, has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her
doctrine by that of her instructors and her pupils. Proclus was taught
by the men who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the
Platonic succession descended from her to him. His throne, however, was
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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 Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader
to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact;
they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards
unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us
the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves,
but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming EGO of
ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must
be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is
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