| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from it somewhat
largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de
Tocqueville's book is founded on researches into the French
Archives, which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him;
and contains innumerable significant facts, which are to be found
(as far as I am aware) in no other accessible work.
The French people--says M. de Tocqueville--made, in 1789, the
greatest effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to
speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that
which they had heretofore been, from that which they sought to
become hereafter. But he had long thought that they had succeeded
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind,
to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds
en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different
branches of humanity.
I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a
philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come
in 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the greatheaded brown
people who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that of a twelfth-century
Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of
Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand
years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf
 Shadow out of Time |