| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows
were thick with the ice crystals. "I suppose," I remarked, "that,
homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to
it--that it is the clew which will guide you in the solution of
some mystery and the punishment of some crime."
"No, no. No crime," said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. "Only one of
those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have
four million human beings all jostling each other within the
space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so
dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events
may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: For the eye was full of life. It was a young child's eye set in a
death's head; the light quivered in the depths of its youthful
liquid brightness. Shaded by the long dark lashes, it sparkled
like the strange lights that travelers see in lonely places in
winter nights. The eye seemed as if it would fain dart fire at
Don Juan; he saw it thinking, upbraiding, condemning, uttering
accusations, threatening doom; it cried aloud, and gnashed upon
him. All anguish that shakes human souls was gathered there;
supplications the most tender, the wrath of kings, the love in a
girl's heart pleading with the headsman; then, and after all
these, the deeply searching glance a man turns on his fellows as
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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 Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: Whereby you waked the dreaming Lesbian wind,
And kindled night along the lyric shore?
O girl whose lips Erato stooped to kiss,
Do you go sorrowing because of this
In fields where poets sing forevermore?
Or are you glad and is it best to be
A silent music men have never heard,
A dream in all our souls that we may say:
"Her voice had all the rapture of the sea,
And all the clear cool quiver of a bird
Deep in a forest at the break of day"?
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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 The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: But in the nature of things, even were there a million such souls
round about us, we could not become aware of the existence of one
of them, for we have no organ or faculty for the perception of
soul apart from the material structure and activities in which it
has been manifested throughout the whole course of our
experience. Even our own self-consciousness involves the
consciousness of ourselves as partly material bodies. These
considerations show that our hypothesis is very different from
the ordinary hypotheses with which science deals. The entire
absence of testimony does not raise a negative presumption except
in cases where testimony is accessible. In the hypotheses with
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
