| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: eye fixed on hers), "you infer perhaps the probability
of some negligence--some"--(involuntarily she shook her
head)--"or it may be--of something still less pardonable."
She raised her eyes towards him more fully than she had
ever done before. "My mother's illness," he continued,
"the seizure which ended in her death, was sudden.
The malady itself, one from which she had often suffered,
a bilious fever--its cause therefore constitutional.
On the third day, in short, as soon as she could be
prevailed on, a physician attended her, a very respectable man,
and one in whom she had always placed great confidence.
 Northanger Abbey |
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 Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: no knowledge where there has not previously been ignorance, nor health
where there has not been disease, nor virtue where there has not been vice?
CRITIAS: I think that we have.
SOCRATES: But then it would seem that the antecedents without which a
thing cannot exist are not necessarily useful to it. Otherwise ignorance
would appear useful for knowledge, disease for health, and vice for virtue.
Critias still showed great reluctance to accept any argument which went to
prove that all these things were useless. I saw that it was as difficult
to persuade him as (according to the proverb) it is to boil a stone, so I
said: Let us bid 'good-bye' to the discussion, since we cannot agree
whether these things are useful and a part of wealth or not. But what
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