| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: philandering with a croquet maul and amusing herself by watching my
style of encouraging the fruit canning industry.
"I slid off the counter and delivered up my shovel to Uncle Emsley.
"'That's my niece,' says he; 'Miss Willella Learight, down from
Palestine on a visit. Do you want that I should make you acquainted?'
"'The Holy Land,' I says to myself, my thoughts milling some as I
tried to run 'em into the corral. 'Why not? There was sure angels in
Pales--Why, yes, Uncle Emsley,' I says out loud, 'I'd be awful edified
to meet Miss Learight.'
"So Uncle Emsley took me out in the yard and gave us each other's
entitlements.
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: a wrong assignment of names, and if of names, then of verbs and nouns; and
if of verbs and nouns, then of the sentences which are made up of them; and
comparing nouns to pictures, you may give them all the appropriate sounds,
or only some of them. And as he who gives all the colours makes a good
picture, and he who gives only some of them, a bad or imperfect one, but
still a picture; so he who gives all the sounds makes a good name, and he
who gives only some of them, a bad or imperfect one, but a name still. The
artist of names, that is, the legislator, may be a good or he may be a bad
artist. 'Yes, Socrates, but the cases are not parallel; for if you
subtract or misplace a letter, the name ceases to be a name.' Socrates
admits that the number 10, if an unit is subtracted, would cease to be 10,
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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 Cratylus by Plato: intermediate links, and so the better half of the evidence of the change is
wanting.
(3) Among the incumbrances or illusions of language may be reckoned many
of the rules and traditions of grammar, whether ancient grammar or the
corrections of it which modern philology has introduced. Grammar, like
law, delights in definition: human speech, like human action, though very
far from being a mere chaos, is indefinite, admits of degrees, and is
always in a state of change or transition. Grammar gives an erroneous
conception of language: for it reduces to a system that which is not a
system. Its figures of speech, pleonasms, ellipses, anacolutha, pros to
semainomenon, and the like have no reality; they do not either make
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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 Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: another monkey attacked a _rhesus_, and I saw its face redden as plainly
as that of a man in a violent passion. In the course of a few minutes,
after the battle, the face of this monkey recovered its natural tint.
At the same time that the face reddened, the naked posterior part
of the body, which is always red, seemed to grow still redder;
but I cannot positively assert that this was the case.
When the Mandrill is in any way excited, the brilliantly coloured,
naked parts of the skin are said to become still more vividly coloured.
With several species of baboons the ridge of the forehead projects
much over the eyes, and is studded with a few long hairs,
representing our eyebrows. These animals are always looking
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
