| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: bump a burro off. Let's see, I've got all your stuff but the saddle;
that we'll leave till we get a horse for you. Well, all's ready.
Mescal came at his call and, mounting Black Bolly, rode out toward the
cliff wall, with Wolf trotting before her. Hare bestrode Noddle.
August, waving good-bye to his women-folk, started the train of burros
after Mescal.
How they would be able to climb the face of that steep cliff puzzled
Hare. Upon nearer view he discovered the yard-wide trail curving upward
in cork-screw fashion round a projecting corner of cliff. The stone was
a soft red shale, and the trail had been cut in it at a steep angle. It
was so steep that the burros appeared to be climbing straight up. Noddle
The Heritage of the Desert |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: centuries, had been a thing of phase and phase, like the ageing
and dying of a man, this, like his killing by railway or motor
car, was one swift, conclusive smashing and an end.
2
The early battles of the aerial war were no doubt determined by
attempts to realise the old naval maxim, to ascertain the
position of the enemy's fleet and to destroy it. There was first
the battle of the Bernese Oberland, in which the Italian and
French navigables in their flank raid upon the Franconian Park
were assailed by the Swiss experimental squadron, supported as
the day wore on by German airships, and then the encounter of the
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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 Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly,
and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming
of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then,
after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and
six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another
chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and
tremulousness and meditation as before.
But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent
revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye
for colours and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere
fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed
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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 Timaeus by Plato: objections which may be urged against Kant's doctrine of the ideality of
space and time at once press upon us. If time is unreal, then all which is
contained in time is unreal--the succession of human thoughts as well as
the flux of sensations; there is no connecting link between (Greek) and
(Greek). Yet, on the other hand, we are conscious that knowledge is
independent of time, that truth is not a thing of yesterday or tomorrow,
but an 'eternal now.' To the 'spectator of all time and all existence' the
universe remains at rest. The truths of geometry and arithmetic in all
their combinations are always the same. The generations of men, like the
leaves of the forest, come and go, but the mathematical laws by which the
world is governed remain, and seem as if they could never change. The
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