| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: he cried; "you shall----"
"In the first place," said she composedly, thrusting him back
as he came nearer--"in the first place, you are not to
compromise me. My woman might overhear you. Respect me, I beg
of you. Your familiarity is all very well in my boudoir in an
evening; here it is quite different. Besides, what may your `you
shall' mean? `You shall.' No one as yet has ever used that word
to me. It is quite ridiculous, it seems to me, absolutely
ridiculous.
"Will you surrender nothing to me on this point?"
"Oh! do you call a woman's right to dispose of herself a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: takes place in the same spot, and is handed down from one
generation to another, each one profiting by the experience of
the last. Of all nations, those submit to civilization with the
most difficulty which habitually live by the chase. Pastoral
tribes, indeed, often change their place of abode; but they
follow a regular order in their migrations, and often return
again to their old stations, whilst the dwelling of the hunter
varies with that of the animals he pursues.
Several attempts have been made to diffuse knowledge amongst
the Indians, without controlling their wandering propensities; by
the Jesuits in Canada, and by the Puritans in New England; *k but
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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 Theaetetus by Plato: arises owing to the childhood of the human mind, like the parallel
difficulty respecting Not-being. Men had only recently arrived at the
notion of opinion; they could not at once define the true and pass beyond
into the false. The very word doxa was full of ambiguity, being sometimes,
as in the Eleatic philosophy, applied to the sensible world, and again used
in the more ordinary sense of opinion. There is no connexion between
sensible appearance and probability, and yet both of them met in the word
doxa, and could hardly be disengaged from one another in the mind of the
Greek living in the fifth or fourth century B.C. To this was often added,
as at the end of the fifth book of the Republic, the idea of relation,
which is equally distinct from either of them; also a fourth notion, the
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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 United States Bill of Rights: computers we used then didn't have lower case at all.
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These original Project Gutenberg Etexts will be compiled into a file
containing them all, in order to improve the content ratios of Etext
to header material.
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The United States Bill of Rights.
The Ten Original Amendments to the Constitution of the United States
Passed by Congress September 25, 1789
Ratified December 15, 1791
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