Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1155/en

The soul-astral, which touches the plant — as a purely living-etheric being — only from without, has in the animal become inner being. The animal bounds itself as a bodily organism against the outside and forms its body into the instrument of its essential unfolding. Through its senses the animal experiences its outer world and unfolds from this experience its activity in warmth, air, water, and earth. By virtue of its soul-nature, the substances compose themselves into the wonder-work of its organs, which in accordance with their executing activities assume the most wondrous configurations. In each of these activities a wisdom in its perfection expresses itself. If one would draw near in knowledge to the being of an animal, one must strive to inwardize all that has been perceived through the senses and to form it into a lived thought-picture. The wisdom-filled nexus that reveals itself therein furnishes the feeling cognition with the infallible certainty that the forces which compose the substances of the animal body — and through which it is able to set itself into activity — have their essential ground in the astral or soul body of the animal