Lecture 3
KOBERWITZ, 11th
June, 1924.
My Dear Friends,
The earthly and cosmic forces, of which I have spoken,
work in the farm through the substances of the Earth,
needless to say. In the next lectures we shall pass on to
various practical aspects, but before we can do so we
must enter a little more precisely into the question: How
do these forces work through the substances of the Earth?
In the present lecture we shall consider Nature's
activity quite generally speaking.
One of the most important questions in agriculture is
that of the significance of nitrogen — its
influence in all farm-production. This is generally
recognised; nevertheless the question, what is the
essence of nitrogen's activity, has fallen into great
confusion nowadays. Wherever nitrogen is active, men only
recognise, as it were, the last excrescence of its
activities — the most superficial aspects in which
it finds expression. They do not penetrate to the
relationships of Nature wherein nitrogen is working, nor
can they do so, so long as they remain within restricted
spheres. We must look out into the wide spaces, into the
wider aspects of Nature, and study the activities of
nitrogen in the Universe as a whole. We might even say —
and this indeed will presently emerge — that
nitrogen as such does not play the first and foremost
part in the life of plants. Nevertheless, to understand
plant-life it is of the first importance for us to learn
to know the part which nitrogen does play.
Nitrogen, as she works in the life of Nature, has so to
speak four sisters, whose working we must learn to know
at the same time if we would understand the functions and
significance of nitrogen herself in Nature's so-called
household. The four sisters of nitrogen are those that
are united with her in plant and animal protein, in a way
that is not yet clear to the outer science of to-day. I
mean the four sisters, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and
sulphur.
To know the full significance of protein it will not
suffice us to enumerate as its main ingredients hydrogen,
oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. We must include another
substance, of the profoundest importance for protein, and
that is sulphur. Sulphur in protein is the very element
which acts as mediator between the Spiritual that is
spread throughout the Universe — the formative
power of the Spiritual — and the physical.
Truly we may say, whoever would trace the tracks which
the Spiritual marks out in the material world, must
follow the activity of sulphur. Though this activity
appears less obvious than that of other substances,
nevertheless it is of great importance; for it is along
the paths of sulphur that the Spiritual works into the
physical domain of Nature. Sulphur is actually the
carrier of the Spiritual. Hence the ancient name,
“sulphur,” which is closely akin to
the name “phosphorus.” The name is due
to the fact that in olden time they recognised in the
out-spreading, sun-filled light, the Spiritual itself as
it spreads far and wide. Therefore they named
“light-bearers” these substances — like
sulphur and phosphorus — which have to do with the
working of light into matter.
Seeing that sulphur's activity in the economy of Nature
is so very fine and delicate, we shall, however, best
approach it by first considering the four other sisters:
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. These we must
first learn to understand; we shall see what they signify
in the whole being of the Universe. The chemist of to-day
knows little of these substances. He knows what they look
like when he has them in his laboratory, but he knows
practically nothing of their inner significance in the
working of the Cosmos as a whole. The knowledge of modern
chemistry about them is scarcely more than our knowledge
of a man of whose outer form we caught a glimpse as we
passed by him in the street — or maybe we took a
snapshot of him, and with the help of the photograph we
can now call him to mind. We must learn to know the
deeper essence of these substances. What science does is
scarcely more than to take snapshots of them with a
camera. All that is said of them in scientific books and
lectures is scarcely more than that.
Let us begin with carbon. (The application of
these matters to plant-life will presently emerge).
Carbon indeed has fallen in our time from a highly
aristocratic status to a very plebeian one. Alas, how
many other beings of the Universe have followed it along
the same sad way! What do we see in carbon nowadays? That
which we use, as coal, to heat our ovens! That which we
use, as graphite, for our writing. True, we still assign
an aristocratic value to one modification of carbon,
namely diamond, but we have little opportunity to value
even that, for we can no longer afford to buy it!
What is known about carbon nowadays is very little when
you consider its infinite significance in the Universe.
The time is not so very long ago — only a few
centuries — when this black fellow, carbon, was so
highly esteemed as to be called by a very noble name.
They called it the Stone of the Wise — the
Philosopher's Stone. There has been much chatter
es to what the “Stone of the Wise” may be.
Very little has emerged from it. When the old alchemists
and such people spoke of the Stone of the Wise, they
meant carbon — in the various modifications in
which it occurs. They held the name so secret and occult,
only because if they had not done so, anyone and everyone
would have possessed it — for it was only carbon.
Why then was carbon the “Stone of the Wise?”
Here we can answer, with an idea from olden time, a point
we need to understand again in our time when speaking
about carbon. It is quite true, carbon occurs to-day in
Nature in a broken, crumbled form, as coal or even
graphite — broken and crumbled, owing to certain
processes which it has undergone. How different it
appears, however, when we perceive it in its living
activity, passing through the human or animal body, or
building up the plant-body out of its peculiar
conditions. Then the amorphous, formless substance which
we see as coal or carbon proves to be only the last
excrescence — the corpse of that which coal or
carbon truly is in Nature's household.
Carbon, in effect, is the bearer of all the creatively
formative processes in Nature. Whatever in Nature is
formed and shaped be it the form of the plant persisting
for a comparatively short time, or the eternally changing
configuration of the animal body — carbon is
everywhere the great plastician. It does not only carry
in itself its black substantiality. Wherever we find it
in full action and inner mobility, it bears within it the
creative and formative cosmic pictures — the
sublime cosmic Imaginations, out of which all that is
formed in Nature must ultimately proceed.
There is a hidden plastic artist in carbon, and this
plastician building the manifold forms that are built up
in Nature — makes use of sulphur in the process.
Truly to see the carbon as it works in Nature, we must
behold the Spirit-activity of the great Universe,
moistening itself so-to-speak with sulphur, and working
as a plastic artist — building with the help of
carbon the more firm and well-defined form of the plant,
or again, building the form in man, which passes away
again the very moment it comes into being.
For it is thus that man is not plant, but man. He has the
faculty, time and again to destroy the form as soon as it
arises; for he excretes the carbon, bound to the oxygen,
as carbonic acid. Carbon in the human body would
form us too stiffly and firmly — it would stiffen
our form like a palm. Carbon is constantly about to make
us still and firm in this way, and for this very reason
our breathing must constantly dismantle what the carbon
builds. Our breathing tears the carbon out of its
rigidity, unites it with the oxygen and carries it
outward. So we are formed in the mobility which we as
human beings need. In plants, the carbon is present in a
very different way. To a certain degree it is fastened —
even in annual plants — in firm configuration.
There is an old saying in respect of man: “Blood is
a very special fluid” — and we can truly say:
the human Ego, pulsating in the blood, finds there its
physical expression. More accurately speaking, however,
it is in the carbon — weaving and wielding, forming
itself, dissolving the form again. It is on the paths of
this carbon — moistened with sulphur — that
that spiritual Being which we call the Ego of man moves
through the blood. And as the human Ego — the
essential Spirit of man — lives in the carbon, so
in a manner of speaking the Ego of the Universe lives as
the Spirit of the Universe — lives via the sulphur
in the carbon as it forms itself and ever again dissolves
the form.
In bygone epochs of Earth-evolution carbon alone was
deposited or precipitated. Only at a later stage was
there added to it, for example, the limestone nature
which man makes use of to create something more solid as
a basis and support — a solid scaffolding for his
existence. Precisely in order to enable what is living in
the carbon to remain in perpetual movement, man creates
an underlying framework in his limestone-bony skeleton.
So does the animal, at any rate the higher animal. Thus,
in his ever-mobile carbon-formative process, man lifts
himself out of the merely mineral and rigid
limestone-formation which the Earth possesses and which
he too incorporates in order to have some solid Earth
within him. For in the limestone form of the skeleton he
has the solid Earth within him.
So you can have the following idea. Underlying all living
things is a carbon-like scaffolding or framework —
more or less rigid or fluctuating as the case may be —
and along the paths of this framework the Spiritual moves
through the World. Let me now make a drawing (purely
diagrammatic) so that we have it before us visibly and
graphically. I will here draw a scaffolding or framework such
as the Spirit builds, working always with the help of
sulphur. This, therefore, is either the ever-changing
carbon constantly moving in the sulphur, in its very fine
dilution — or, as in plants, it is a
carbon-frame-work more or less hard and fast, having
become solidified, mingled with other ingredients.
Now whether it be man or any other living being, the
living being must always be permeated by an ethereal
— for the ethereal is the true bearer of life, as
we have often emphasised. This, therefore, which
represents the carbonaceous framework of a living entity,
must in its turn be permeated by an ethereal. The latter
will either stay still — holding fast to the beams
of the framework — or it will also be involved in
more or less fluctuating movement. In either case, the
ethereal must be spread out, wherever the framework is.
Once more, there must be something ethereal wherever the
framework is. Now this ethereal, if it remained alone,
could certainly not exist as such within our physical and
earthly world. It would, so to speak, always slide
through into the empty void. It could not hold what it
must take hold of in the physical, earthly world, if it
had not a physical carrier.
This, after all, is the peculiarity of all that we have
on Earth: the Spiritual here must always have physical
carriers. Then the materialists come, and take only the
physical carrier into account, forgetting the Spiritual
which it carries. And they are always in the right —
for the first thing that meets us is the physical
carrier. They only leave out of account that it is the
Spiritual which must have a physical carrier
everywhere.
What then is the physical carrier of that Spiritual which
works in the ethereal? (For we may say, the ethereal
represents the lowest kind of spiritual working). What is
the physical carrier which is so permeated by the
ethereal that the ethereal, moistened once more with
sulphur, brings into it what it has to carry — not
in Formation this time, not in the building of the
framework — but in eternal quickness and mobility
into the midst of the framework? This physical element
which with the help of sulphur carries the influences of
life out of the universal ether into the physical, is
none other than oxygen. I have sketched it here in
green. if you regard it physically, it represents the
oxygen. It is the weaving, vibrant and pulsating essence
that moves along the paths of the oxygen. For the
ethereal moves with the help of sulphur along the paths
of oxygen.
Only now does the breathing process reveal its
meaning. In breathing we absorb the oxygen. A modern
materialist will only speak of oxygen such as he has in
his retort when he accomplishes, say, an electrolysis of
water. But in this oxygen the lowest of the
super-sensible, that is the ethereal, is living —
unless indeed it has been killed or driven out, as it
must be in the air we have around us. In the air of our
breathing the living quality is killed, is driven out,
for the living oxygen would make us faint Whenever
anything more highly living enters into us we become
faint. Even an ordinary hypertrophy of growth — if
it occurs at a place where it ought not to occur —
will make us faint, nay even more than faint. If we were
surrounded by living air in which the living oxygen were
present, we should go about stunned and benumbed. The
oxygen around us must be killed. Nevertheless, by virtue
of its native essence it is the bearer of life —
that is, of the ethereal. And it becomes the bearer of
life the moment it escapes from the sphere of those tasks
which are allotted to it inasmuch as it surrounds the
human being outwardly, around the senses. As soon as it
enters into us through our breathing it becomes alive
again. Inside us it must be alive.
Circulating inside us, the oxygen is not the same as it
is where it surrounds us externally. Within us, it is
living oxygen, and in like manner it becomes living
oxygen the moment it passes, from the atmosphere we
breathe, into the soil of the Earth. Albeit it is not so
highly living there as it is in us and in the animals,
nevertheless, there too it becomes living oxygen.
Oxygen under the earth is not the same as oxygen above
the earth.
It is difficult to come to an understanding on these
matters which the physicists and chemists, for — by
the methods they apply — from the very outset the
oxygen must always be drawn out of the earth
realm; hence they can only have dead oxygen before them.
There is no other possibility for them. That is the fate
of every science that only considers the physical. It can
only understand the corpse. In reality, oxygen is the
bearer of the living ether, and the living ether holds
sway in it by using sulphur as its way of access.
But we must now go farther. I have placed two things side
by side; on the one hand the carbon framework, wherein
are manifested the workings of the highest spiritual
essence which is accessible to us on Earth: the human
Ego, or the cosmic spiritual Being which is working in
the plants. Observe the human process: we have the
breathing before us — the living oxygen as it
occurs inside the human being, the living oxygen carrying
the ether. And in the background we have the
carbon-framework, which in the human being is in
perpetual movement. These two must come together. The
oxygen must somehow find its way along the paths mapped
out by the framework. Wherever any line, or the like, is
drawn by the carbon — by the spirit of the carbon —
whether in man or anywhere in Nature there the ethereal
oxygen-principle must somehow find its way. It must find
access to the spiritual carbon-principle. Flow does it do
so? Where is the mediator in this process?
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Figure 3
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The mediator is none other than nitrogen. Nitrogen
guides the life into the form or
configuration which is embodied in the carbon. Wherever
nitrogen occurs, its task is to mediate between the life
and the spiritual essence which to begin with is in the
carbon-nature. Everywhere — in the animal kingdom
and in the plant and even in the Earth — the bridge
between carbon and oxygen is built by nitrogen. And the
spirituality which — once again with the help of
sulphur is working thus in nitrogen, is that which we are
wont to describe as the astral. It is the astral
spirituality in the human astral body. It is the astral
spirituality in the Earth's environment. For as you know,
there too the astral is working — in the life of
plants and animals, and so on.
Thus, spiritually speaking we have the astral placed
between the oxygen and the carbon, and this astral
impresses itself upon the physical by making use of
nitrogen. Nitrogen enables it to work physically.
Wherever nitrogen is, thither the astral extends. The
ethereal principle of life would flow away everywhere
like a cloud, it would take no account of the
carbon-framework were it not for the nitrogen. The
nitrogen has an immense power of attraction for the
carbon-framework. Wherever the lines are traced and the
paths mapped out in the carbon, thither the nitrogen
carries the oxygen — thither the astral in the
nitrogen drags the ethereal.
Nitrogen is for ever dragging the living to the spiritual
principle. Therefore, in man, nitrogen is so essential to
the life of the soul. For the soul itself is the mediator
between the Spirit and the mere principle of life. Truly,
this nitrogen is a most wonderful thing. If we could
trace its paths in the human organism, we should perceive
in it once more a complete human being. This
“nitrogen-man” actually exists. If we could
peal him out of the body he would be the finest ghost you
could imagine. For the nitrogen-man imitates to
perfection whatever is there in the solid human
framework, while on the other hand it flows perpetually
into the element of life.
Now you can see into the human breathing process. Through
it man receives into himself the oxygen — that is,
the ethereal life. Then comes the internal nitrogen, and
carries the oxygen everywhere — wherever there is
carbon, i.e., wherever there is something formed
and figured, albeit in everlasting change and movement.
Thither the nitrogen carries the oxygen, so that it may
fetch the carbon and get rid of it. Nitrogen is the real
mediator, for the oxygen to be turned into carbonic acid
and so to be breathed out.
This nitrogen surrounds us on all hands. As you know, we
have around us only a small proportion of oxygen, which
is the bearer of life, and a far larger proportion of
nitrogen—the bearer of the astral spirit. By day we
have great need of the oxygen, and by night too we need
this oxygen in our environment. But we pay far less
attention, whether by day or by night, to the nitrogen.
We imagine that we are less in need of it—I mean
now the nitrogen in the air we breathe. But it is
precisely the nitrogen which has a spiritual relation to
us. You might undertake the following experiment.
Put a human being in a given space filled with air, and
then remove a small quantity of nitrogen from the air
that fills the space, thus making the air around him
slightly poorer in nitrogen than it is in normal life. If
the experiment could be done carefully enough, you would
convince yourselves that the nitrogen is immediately
replaced. If not from without, then, as you could prove,
it would be replaced from within the human being.
He himself would have to give it off, in order to bring
it back again into that quantitative condition to which,
as nitrogen, it is accustomed. As human beings we must
establish the right percentage-relationship between our
whole inner nature and the nitrogen that surrounds us. It
will not do for the nitrogen around us to be decreased.
True, in a certain Sense it would still suffice us. We do
not actually need to breathe nitrogen. But for the
spiritual relation, which is no less a reality, only the
quantity of nitrogen to which we are accustomed in the
air is right and proper. You see from this how strongly
nitrogen plays over into the spiritual realm.
At this point I think you will have a true idea, of the
necessity of nitrogen for the life of plants. The plant
as it stands before us in the soul has only a physical
and an ether-body; unlike the animal, it has not an
astral body within it. Nevertheless, outside it the
astral must be there on all hands. The plant would never
blossom if the astral did not touch it from outside.
Though it does not absorb it (as man and the animals do)
nevertheless, the plant must be touched by the astral
from outside. The astral is everywhere, and nitrogen
itself — the bearer of the astral — is
everywhere, moving about as a corpse in the air. But the
moment it comes into the Earth, it is alive again. Just
as the oxygen does, so too the nitrogen becomes alive;
nay more it becomes sentient and sensitive inside the
Earth. Strange as it may sound to the materialist madcaps
of to-day, nitrogen not only becomes alive but sensitive
inside the Earth; and this is of the greatest importance
for agriculture. Nitrogen becomes the bearer of that
mysterious sensitiveness which is poured out over the
whole life of the Earth.
It is the nitrogen which senses whether there is the
proper quantity of water in a given district of the
Earth. If so, it has a sympathetic feeling. If there is
too little water, it has a feeling of antipathy. It has a
sympathetic feeling if the right plants are there for the
given soil. In a word, nitrogen pours out over all things
a kind of sensitive life. And above all, you will
remember what I told you yesterday and in the previous
lectures: how the planets, Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc., have
an influence on the formation and life of plants. You
might say, nobody knows of that! It is quite true, for
ordinary life you can say so. Nobody knows! But the
nitrogen that is everywhere present — the nitrogen
knows very well indeed, and knows it quite correctly.
Nitrogen is not unconscious of that which comes from the
Stars and works itself out in the life of plants, in tim
life of Earth. Nitrogen is the sensitive mediator, even
as in our human nerves-and-senses system it is the
nitrogen which mediates for our sensation. Nitrogen is
verily the bearer of sensation. So you can
penetrate into the intimate life of Nature if you can see
the nitrogen everywhere, moving about like flowing,
fluctuating feelings. We shall find the Treatment of
nitrogen, above all, infinitely important for the life of
plants. These things we shall enter into later. Now,
however, one thing more is necessary.
You have seen how there is a living interplay. On the one
hand there is that which works out of the Spirit in the
carbon-principle, taking an forms as of a
scaffolding or framework. This is in constant interplay
with what works out of the astral in the
nitrogen-principle, permeating the framework with
inner life, making it sentient. And in all this, life
itself is working through the oxygen-principle.
But these things can only work together in the earthly
realm inasmuch as it is permeated by yet another
principle, which for our physical world establishes the
connection with the wide spaces of the Cosmos.
For earthly life it is impossible that the Earth should
wander through the Cosmos as a solid thing, separate from
the surrounding Universe. If the Earth did so, it would
be like a man who lived on a farm but wanted to remain
independent, leaving outside him all is growing in the
fields. If he is sensible, he will not do so! There are
many things out in the fields to-day, which in the near
future will be in the stomachs of this honoured company,
and — thence in one way or another — it will
find its way back again on to the fields. As human beings
we cannot truly say that we are separate. We cannot sever
ourselves. We are united with our surroundings — we
belong to our environment. As my little finger belongs to
me, so do the things that are around us naturally belong
to the whole human being. There must be constant
interchange of substance, and so it must be between the
Earth — with all its creatures —and the
entire Universe. All that is living in physical forms
upon the Earth must eventually be led back again into the
great Universe. It must be able to be purified and
cleansed, so to speak, in the universal All. So now we
have the following:—
To begin with, we have what I sketched before in blue
,the carbon-framework. Then there is that which
you see here the green—the ethereal, oxygen
principle. And then — everywhere emerging from the
oxygen, carried by nitrogen to all these lines there is
that which develops as the astral, as the transition
between the carbonaceous and the oxygen principle. I
could show you everywhere, how the nitrogen carries into
these blue lines what is indicated diagrammatically in
the green.
But now, all that is thus developed in the living
creature, structurally as in a fine and delicate design,
must eventually be able to vanish again. It is not the
Spirit that vanishes, but that which the Spirit has built
into the carbon, drawing the life to itself out of the
oxygen as it does so. This must be able once more to
disappear. Not only in the sense that it vanishes on
Earth; it must be able to vanish into the Cosmos,
into the universal All.
This is achieved by a substance which is as nearly as
possible akin to the physical and yet again as nearly
akin to the spiritualand that is hydrogen. Truly,
in hydrogen — although it is itself the finest of
physical elements — the physical flows outward,
utterly broken and scattered, and carried once more by
the sulphur out into the void, into the indistinguishable
realms of the Cosmos.
We may describe the process thus: In all these
structures, the Spiritual has become physical. There it
is living in the body astrally, there it is living in its
image, as the Spirit or the Ego — living in a
physical way as Spirit transmuted into the physical.
After a time, however, it no longer feels comfortable
there. It wants to dissolve again. And now once more —
moistening itself with sulphur — it needs a
substance wherein it can take its leave of all structure
and definition, and find its way outward into the
undefined chaos of the universal All, where there is
nothing more of this organisation or that.
Now the substance which is so near to the Spiritual on
the one hand and to the substantial on the other, is
hydrogen. Hydrogen carries out again into the far spaces
of the Universe all that is formed, and alive,
and astral. Hydrogen carries it upward and
outward, till it becomes of such a nature that it can be
received out of the Universe once more, as we described
above. It is hydrogen which dissolves everything away.
So then we have these five substances. They, to begin
with, represent what works and weaves in the living —
and in the apparently dead, which after all is only
transiently dead. Sulphur, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
nitrogen: each of these materials is inwardly related to
a specific spiritual principle. They are therefore very
different from what our modern chemists would relate. Our
chemists speak only of the corpses of the substances —
not of the real substances, which we must rather learn to
know as sentient and living entities, with the single
exception of hydrogen. Precisely because hydrogen is
apparently the thinnest element — with the least
atomic weight —it is really the least spiritual of
all.
And now I ask you to observe: When you meditate, what are
you really doing? (I must insert this observation; I want
you to see that these things are not conceived “out
of the blue”). The Orientals used to meditate in
their way; we in the mid-European West do it in our way.
Our meditation is connected only indirectly with
the breathing. We live and weave in concentration and
meditation. However, all that we do when we devote
ourselves to these exercises of the soul still has its
bodily counterpart. Albeit this is delicate and subtle,
nevertheless, however subtly, meditation somewhat
modifies the regular course of our breathing, which as
you know is connected so intimately with the life of man.
In meditating, we always retain in ourselves a little
more carbon dioxide than we do in the normal process of
waking consciousness. A little more carbon dioxide always
remains behind in us. Thus we do not at once expel the
full impetus of the carbonic acid, as we do in the
everyday, bull-at-the-gate kind of life. We keep a little
of it back. We do not drive the carbon dioxide with its
full momentum out into the surrounding spaces, where the
nitrogen is all around us. We keep it back a little.
If you knock up against something with your skull —
if you knock against a table, for example — you
will only be conscious of your own pain. If, however, you
rub against it gently, you will be conscious of the
surface of the table. So it is when you meditate. By and
by you grow into a conscious living experience of the
nitrogen all around you. Such is the real process in
meditation. All becomes knowledge and perception —even
that which is living in the nitrogen. And this nitrogen
is a very clever fellow! He will inform you of what
Mercury and Venus and the rest are doing. He knows it
all, he really senses it. These things are based on
absolutely real processes, and I shall presently touch on
some of them in somewhat greater detail. This is the
point where the Spiritual in our inner life bearing to
have a certain bearing on our work as farmers.
This is the point which has always awakened the keen
interest of our dear friend Stegemann. I mean this
working-together of the soul and Spirit in us, with all
that is around us. It is not at all a bad thing if he who
has farming to do can meditate. He thereby makes himself
receptive to the revelations of nitrogen. He becomes more
and more receptive to them. If we have made ourselves
thus receptive to nitrogen's revelations, we shall
presently conduct our farming in a very different style
than before. We suddenly begin to know all kinds of
things, all kinds of things emerge. All kinds of secrets
that prevail in farm and farmyard — we suddenly
begin to know them.
Nay more! I cannot repeat what I said here an hour ago,
but in another way I may perhaps characterise it again.
Think of a simple peasant-farmer, one whom your scholar
will certainly not deem to be a learned man. There he is,
walking out over his fields. The peasant is stupid —so
the learned man will say. But in reality it is not true,
for the simple reason that the peasant —forgive me,
but it is so — is himself a meditator. Oh,
it is very much that he meditates in the long winter
nights! He does indeed acquire a kind of method — a
method of spiritual perception. Only he cannot express
it. It suddenly emerges in him. We go through the fields,
and all of a sudden the knowledge is there in us. We know
it absolutely. Afterwards we put it to the test and find
it confirmed. I in my youth, at least, when I lived among
the peasant folk, could witness this again and again. It
really is so, and from such things as these we must take
our start once more. The merely intellectual life is not
sufficient — it can never lead into these depths.
We must begin again from such things. After all, the
weaving life of Nature is very fine and delicate. We
cannot sense it — it eludes our coarse-grained
intellectual conceptions. Such is the mistake science has
made in recent times. With coarse-grained, wide-meshed
intellectual conceptions it tries to apprehend things
that are far more finely woven.
All of these substances — sulphur, carbon,
nitrogen, hydrogen — all are united together in
protein. Now we are in a position to understand the
process of seed-formation a little more fully than
hitherto. Wherever carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen occur —
in leaf or flower, calyx or root — everywhere they
are bound to other substances in one form or another.
They are dependent on these other substances; they are
not independent. There are only two ways in which they
can become independent: namely, on the one hand when the
hydrogen carries them outward into the far spaces of the
Universe — separates them all, carries them all
away and merges them into an universal chaos; and on the
other hand, when the hydrogen drives these fundamental
substances of protein into the tiny seed-formation and
makes them independent there, so that they become
receptive to the inpouring forces of the Cosmos. In the
tiny seed-formation there is chaos, and away in the far
circumference there is chaos once more. Chaos in the seed
must interact with chaos in the farthest circles of the
Universe. Then the new being arises.
Now let us look how the action of these so-called
substances — which in reality are bearers of the
Spirit — comes about in Nature. You see, that which
works even inside the human being as oxygen and nitrogen,
behaves itself tolerably well. There in the human being
the properties of oxygen and nitrogen are living. One
only does not perceive them with ordinary science, for
they are hidden to outward appearance. But the products
of the carbon and hydrogen principles cannot behave quite
so simply.
Take, to begin with, carbon. When the carbon, with its
inherent activity, comes from the plant into the animal
or human kingdom, it must first become mobile — in
the transient stage at any rate. If it is then to present
the firm and solid figure (man or animal), it must build
on a more deep-seated scaffolding or framework. This is
none other than the very deep-seated framework which is
contained, not only in our bony skeleton with its
limestone — nature, but also in the
silicious element which we continually bear within
us.
To a certain extent, the carbon in man and animal masks
its native power of configuration. It finds a pillar of
support in the configurative forces of limestone and
silicon. Limestone gives it the earthly, silicon the
cosmic formative power. Carbon, therefore, in man himself
— and in the animal — does not declare itself
exclusively competent, but seeks support in the formative
activities of limestone and silicon.
Now we find limestone and silicon as the basis of plant
growth too. Our need is to gain a knowledge of what the
carbon develops throughout the process of digestion,
breathing and circulation in man — in relation to
the bony structure and the silicious structure. We must
somehow evolve a knowledge of what is going on in there —
inside the human being. We should be able to see it all,
if we could somehow creep inside. We should see the
carbonaceous formative activity raying out from the
circulatory process into the calcium and silicon in man.
This is the kind of vision we must unfold when we look
out over he surface of the Earth, covered as it is with
plants and having beneath it the limestone and the silica
— the calcium and silicon. We cannot look inside
the human being; we must evolve the same knowledge by
looking out over the Earth. There we behold the
oxygen-nature caught up by the nitrogen and carried down
into the carbon-nature. (The carbon itself, however,
seeks support in the principles of calcium and silicon.
We might also say, the process only passes through
the carbon). That which is living in our environment —
kindled to life in the oxygen — must be carried
into the depths of the Earth, there to find support in
the silica, working formatively in the calcium or
limestone.
If we have any feeling or receptivity for these things,
we can observe the process most wonderfully in the
papilionaceae or leguminosae — in all
those plants which are well known in farming as the
nitrogen-collectors. They indeed have the function of
drawing in the nitrogen, so to communicate it to that
which is beneath them. Observe these leguminosae. We may
truly say, down there in the Earth something is athirst
for nitrogen; something is there that needs it, even as
the lung of man needs oxygen. It is the limestone
principle. Truly we may say, the limestone in the Earth
is dependent on a kind of nitrogen-inbreathing,
even as the human lung depends on the inbreathing of
oxygen. These plants — the papilionaceae —
represent something not unlike what takes place on our
epithelial cells. By a kind of inbreathing process it
finds its way down there.
Broadly speaking, the papilionaceae are the only plants
of this kind. All other plants are akin, not to the
inbreathing, but to the outbreathing process. Indeed, the
entire organism of the plant-world is dissolved into two
when we contemplate it in relation to nitrogen. Observe
it as a kind of nitrogen-breathing, and the entire
organism of the plant-world is thus dissolved. On the one
hand, where we encounter any species of papilionaceae, we
are observing as it were the paths of the breathing, and
where we find any other plants, there we are looking at
the remaining organs, which breathe in a far more hidden
way and have indeed other specific functions. We must
learn to regard the plant-world in this way. Every plant
species must appear to us, placed in the total organism
of the plant-world, like the single human organs in the
total organism of man. We must regard the several plants
as parts of a totality. Look on the matter in this way,
and we shall perceive the great significance of the
papilionaceae. It is no doubt already known, but we must
also recognise the spiritual foundations of these things.
Otherwise the danger is very great that in the near
future, when still more of the old will be lost, men will
adopt false paths in the application of the new.
Observe how the papilionaceae work. They all have the
tendency to retain, to some extent in the region of the
leaf-like nature, the fruiting process which in
the other plants goes farther upward. They have a
tendency to fruit even before the flowering process. You
can see this everywhere in the papilionaceae; they tend
to fruit even before they come to flower. It is due to
the fact that they retain far nearer to the Earth that
which expresses itself in the nitrogen nature. Indeed, as
you know, they actually carry the nitrogen-nature into
the soil.
Therefore, in these plants, everything that belongs to
nitrogen lives far more nearly inclined to the Earth than
in the other plants, where it evolves at a greater
distance from the Earth. See how they tend to colour
their leaves, not with the ordinary green, but often with
a darker shade. Observe too how the fruit, properly
speaking, tends to be stunted. The seeds, for instance,
only retain their germinating power for a short time,
after which they lose it.
In effect, these plants are so organised as to bring to
expression, most of all, what the plant-world receives
from the winter — not what it has from the summer.
Hence, one would say, there is always a tendency in these
plants to wait for the winter. With all that they evolve,
they tend to wait for the winter. Their growth is
retarded when they find a sufficiency of what they need —
i.e., of the nitrogen of the air, which in their
own way they can carry downward.
In such ways as these we can look into the life and
growth of all that goes on in and above the surface of
the soil. Now you must also include this fact: the
limestone-nature has in it a wonderful kinship to the
world of human cravings. See how it all becomes organic
and alive! Take the chalk or limestone when it is still
in the form of its element — as calcium. Then
indeed it gives no rest at all. It wants to feel and fill
itself at all costs; it wants to become quicklime that
is, to unite its calcium with oxygen. Even then it is not
satisfied, but craves for all sorts of things —
wants to absorb all manner of metallic acids, or even
bitumen which is scarcely mineral at all. It wants to
draw everything to itself. Down there in the ground it
unfolds a regular craving-nature.
He who is sensitive will feel this difference, as against
a certain other substance. Limestone sucks us out. We
have the distinct feeling: wherever the limestone
principle extends, there is something that reveals a
thorough craving nature. It draws the very plant-life to
itself. In effect, all that the limestone desires to
have, lives in the plant-nature. Time and again, this
must be wrested away from it. How so? By the most
aristocratic principle — that which desires nothing
for itself. There is such a principle, which wants
for nothing more but rests content in itself. That is the
silica-nature. It has indeed come to rest in
itself.
If men believe that they can only see the silica where it
has hard mineral outline, they are mistaken. In
homeopathic proportions, the silicious principle is
everywhere around us;.moreover it rests in itself —
it makes no claims. Limestone claims everything; the
silicon principle claims nothing for itself. It is like
our own sense organs. They too do not perceive
themselves, but that which is outside them. The
silica-nature is the universal sense within the
earthly realm, the limestone-nature is the
universal craving; and the clay mediates between the two.
Clay stands rather nearer to the silicious nature, but it
still mediates towards the limestone.
These things we ought at length to see quite clearly;
then we shall gain a kind of sensitive cognition. Once
more we ought to feel the chalk or limestone as the
kernel-of-desire. Limestone is the fellow who would like
to snatch at everything for himself. Silica, on the other
hand, we should feel as the very superior gentleman who
wrests away all that can be wrested from the clutches of
the limestone, carries it into the atmosphere, and so
unfolds the forms of plants. This aristocratic gentleman,
silica, lives either in the ramparts of his castle —
as in the equisetum plant — or else distributed in
very fine degree, sometimes indeed in highly homeopathic
doses. And he contrives to tear away what must be
torn away from the limestone.
Here once more you see how we encounter Nature's most
wonderfully intimate workings. Carbon is the true
form-creator in all plants; carbon it is that forms the
framework or scaffolding. But in the course of earthly
evolution this was made difficult for carbon. It could
indeed form the plants if it only had water beneath it.
Then it would be equal to the task. But now the limestone
is there beneath it, and the limestone disturbs it.
Therefore it allies itself to silica. Silica and carbon
together — in union with clay, once more create the
forms. They do so in alliance because the resistance, of
the limestone-nature must be overcome.
How then does the plant itself live in the midst of this
process? Down there below, the limestone-principle tries
to get hold of it with tentacles and clutches, while up
above the silica would tend to make it very fine, slender
and fibrous — like the aquatic plants. But in the
midst — giving rise to our actual plant forms —
there is the carbon, which orders all these things. And
as our astral body brings about an inner order
between our Ego and our ether body, so does
the nitrogen work in between, as the astral.
All this we must learn to understand. We must perceive
how the nitrogen is there at work, in between the lime —
the clay — and the silicious — natures —in
between all that the limestone of itself would constantly
drag downward, and the silica of itself would constantly
ray upward. Here then the question arises, what is the
proper way to bring the nitrogen-nature into the world of
plants? We shall deal with this question tomorrow, and so
find our way to the various forms of manuring.
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