| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have certainly
sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an influence which
will never pass away; but can we say that they have the same meaning in
modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as for example the words
'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either have become obsolete, or are
used in new senses, whereas 'individual,' 'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired
an exaggerated importance. Is the manner in which the logical
determinations of thought, or 'categories' as they may be termed, have been
handed down to us, really different from that in which other words have
come down to us? Have they not been equally subject to accident, and are
they not often used by Hegel himself in senses which would have been quite
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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 Glasses by Henry James: rudeness. She would clearly never explain anything by any failure
of her own appeal. There rolled over me while she took leave of us
and floated back to her friends a wave of superstitious dread. I
seemed somehow to see her go forth to her fate, and yet what should
fill out this orb of a high destiny if not such beauty and such
joy? I had a dim idea that Lord Considine was a great proprietor,
and though there mingled with it a faint impression that I
shouldn't like his son the result of the two images was a whimsical
prayer that the girl mightn't miss her possible fortune.
CHAPTER IV
One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into
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