Spirit, the quintessence, precedes the four: Fire intuition, Water feeling, Air thinking, Earth sensation — each a mode of cognition and a state of matter at once, ordered two ways, by rarefaction and by cycle. Tap any element.
Tap any element to see its cognitive function (the Jungian mode), its matter-state, its quality, its position in each ordering, and the brain faculty it corresponds to.
Spirit (the quintessence) heads each ordering as the unifying source. The ontological order (Spirit–Fire–Air–Water–Earth) descends by rarefaction and maps to plasma, gas, liquid, solid; the cyclic order (Spirit–Fire–Water–Air–Earth) follows the zodiac in reverse. The tradition confused the two; in this system they are perpendicular axes.