| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: guardian of fair children, and to him we sung the hymn in measured and
solemn strain.
PHAEDRUS: I know that I had great pleasure in listening to you.
SOCRATES: Let us take this instance and note how the transition was made
from blame to praise.
PHAEDRUS: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: I mean to say that the composition was mostly playful. Yet in
these chance fancies of the hour were involved two principles of which we
should be too glad to have a clearer description if art could give us one.
PHAEDRUS: What are they?
SOCRATES: First, the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea;
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by
men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they
had, it may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their
patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet:
and no man was a hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose
himself before his own helots: they would try if the helot was not
as good as the nobleman. The nobleman had played the mountebank:
why should not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman? The
nobleman's God had been his five senses, with (to use Mr. Carlyle's
phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should not the mountebank
worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see what grace
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