| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: to
kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.
The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of
rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this
transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their
sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully
increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.
And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its
own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-
bourgeois Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: within the cage, nor was the door dropped. He saw and he
was filled with wonder not unmixed with apprehension.
It entered his dull brain that in some way this combination
of circumstances had a connection with his presence there
as the prisoner of the white devil-god.
Nor was he wrong. Tarzan pushed him roughly into
the cage, and in another moment Rabba Kega understood.
Cold sweat broke from every pore of his body--he trembled
as with ague--for the ape-man was binding him securely
in the very spot the kid had previously occupied.
The witch-doctor pleaded, first for his life, and then
The Jungle Tales of Tarzan |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: gallery, a confused sound of voices, of stifled laughter and
light footfalls, and the rustling of silks--the sounds of a band
of revelers struggling for gravity. The door opened, and in came
the Prince and Don Juan's friends, the seven courtesans, and the
singers, disheveled and wild like dancers surprised by the dawn,
when the tapers that have burned through the night struggle with
the sunlight.
They had come to offer the customary condolence to the young
heir.
"Oho! is poor Don Juan really taking this seriously?" said the
Prince in Brambilla's ear.
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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 Parmenides by Plato: and Zeno himself is supposed to admit this. But they appear to him, as he
says in the Philebus also, to be rather truisms than paradoxes. For every
one must acknowledge the obvious fact, that the body being one has many
members, and that, in a thousand ways, the like partakes of the unlike, the
many of the one. The real difficulty begins with the relations of ideas in
themselves, whether of the one and many, or of any other ideas, to one
another and to the mind. But this was a problem which the Eleatic
philosophers had never considered; their thoughts had not gone beyond the
contradictions of matter, motion, space, and the like.
It was no wonder that Parmenides and Zeno should hear the novel
speculations of Socrates with mixed feelings of admiration and displeasure.
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