| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: of a less advanced state of development. In the first place,
if imagination be the impulse of which increase in individuality is
the resulting motion, that quality should be at a minimum there.
The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of
people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack of imagination
is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in contact
with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students.
Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make
it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly
distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people.
One notices it all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer
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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 Turn of the Screw by Henry James: as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted,
by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she
didn't, and at the same time, without showing anything,
arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity
that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity
by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible
increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing,
the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it,
in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements
of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have
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