| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as
this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not
unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume
himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees.
Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or
of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the
world, and did not any more than the scepticism of the ancients require to
be seriously refuted. Like some other philosophical paradoxes, it would
have been better left to die out. It certainly could not be refuted by a
philosophy such as Kant's, in which, no less than in the previously
mentioned systems, the history of the human mind and the nature of language
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: more interesting will the animals generally be: but a greater
depth than fifteen fathoms is not easily reached on this side of
Plymouth; and, on the whole, the beginner will find enough in seven
or eight fathoms to stock an aquarium rivalling any of those in the
"Tank-house" at the Zoological Gardens.
In general, the south coast of England, to the eastward of
Portland, affords bad dredging ground. The friable cliffs, of
comparatively recent formations, keep the sea shallow, and the
bottom smooth and bare, by the vast deposits of sand and gravel.
Yet round the Isle of Wight, especially at the back of the Needles,
there ought to be fertile spots; and Weymouth, according to Mr.
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