| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: that, in spite of fallacious appearances, neither language,
religion, arts, or, in a word, any element of civilisation, can
pass, intact, from one people to another.
Environment, circumstances, and events represent the social
suggestions of the moment. They may have a considerable
influence, but this influence is always momentary if it be
contrary to the suggestions of the race; that is, to those which
are inherited by a nation from the entire series of its
ancestors.
We shall have occasion in several of the chapters of this work to
touch again upon racial influence, and to show that this
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But
we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of
melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the
universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon
one--you remember Tolstoy's case.[106] So there are distinct
elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives
deserve to be discriminated.[107]
[105] A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough's
'Saviour.' General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army,
considers that the first vital step in saving outcasts consists
in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for
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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 Dreams by Olive Schreiner: his head bent low.
And one went to the far East and bought costly pigments, and made a rare
colour and painted, but after a time the picture faded. Another read in
the old books, and made a colour rich and rare, but when he had put it on
the picture it was dead.
But the artist painted on. Always the work got redder and redder, and the
artist grew whiter and whiter. At last one day they found him dead before
his picture, and they took him up to bury him. The other men looked about
in all the pots and crucibles, but they found nothing they had not.
And when they undressed him to put his grave-clothes on him, they found
above his left breast the mark of a wound--it was an old, old wound, that
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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 Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The
table-cloth had ball-fringe and so had the window curtains, and
the carpet was a bed of roses. There were little cupboards on
either side of the fireplace, and in the recesses, ill-made
shelves packed with books, and enriched with pinked American
cloth. There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table,
and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the
evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye caught "The
Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in," written in
large firm letters. My uncle opened a little door like a
cupboard door in the corner of this room, and revealed the
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