The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: of not-being, which we admitted just now to be an utter impossibility.
STRANGER: How well you remember! And now it is high time to hold a
consultation as to what we ought to do about the Sophist; for if we persist
in looking for him in the class of false workers and magicians, you see
that the handles for objection and the difficulties which will arise are
very numerous and obvious.
THEAETETUS: They are indeed.
STRANGER: We have gone through but a very small portion of them, and they
are really infinite.
THEAETETUS: If that is the case, we cannot possibly catch the Sophist.
STRANGER: Shall we then be so faint-hearted as to give him up?
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: body at the instant when exertion is arrested? Did it come from the
sudden contrast between the glory of the sun and the darkness of the
clouds, from whose shadow the charming couple had just emerged?
Perhaps to all these causes we may add the effect of a phenomenon, one
of the noblest which human nature has to offer. If some able
physiologist had studied this being (who, judging by the pride on his
brow and the lightning in his eyes seemed a youth of about seventeen
years of age), and if the student had sought for the springs of that
beaming life beneath the whitest skin that ever the North bestowed
upon her offspring, he would undoubtedly have believed either in some
phosphoric fluid of the nerves shining beneath the cuticle, or in the
 Seraphita |