Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1182/en

With each of the manures one must ask after the being — after the soul-astral force-potential that, through the etheric body and the physical body, so arranges the substances and keeps them in flow that it can appear in its image in the physical-sense world and act in accordance with its being. Individual essential traits of the wild fauna and of the domestic animals were discussed in the chapter "The Soul Organization or the Astral Body of the Agricultural Organism" (p. 111 ff.). There it was established that each animal species, through its bodily activity, makes a contribution to the whole of nature that is, so to speak, a manuring one. Through the activity of the ensouled animal world a wisdom-filled web of relationships arises that pervades the whole of nature in a meaning-giving way. Among the plant-eating mammals it is the ruminants whose organ activity is organized toward preparing a manure that is capable of enlivening and ensouling the "diaphragm organ" — the soil — to a higher degree. This cannot be inferred from the merely quantitative substance-composition alone. It is rather a question of the qualitative relationship of the substances to one another. This bears the stamp of the being of the cow, the sheep, the goat, and so on. The highest level of perfection is reached by the cattle. In the chapter "The Cattle" (p. 146 ff.) an attempt was made to characterize the digestive process permeated and lived through by its essential being, as well as its metabolically-related sense activity and intelligence. If one seeks from there to arrive at an understanding of the long-lasting, beneficial effect of cattle manure in particular upon soil and plants, then perhaps the following consideration can carry us further: The plant grows along the Earth-Sun axis. The root strives into the depths in the direction of the Earth's centre, the culm, stem or trunk rises vertically upward toward the sun. From this vertical axis, leaves and branches grow outward into breadth and width. The leaf-work, spreading itself out horizontally in flat surfaces, receives the raying-in effects of sun and planets by direct path and works them up into living substance, supported by the "earth-sap" (*Xylem*) ascending within the stem, inside the cambium. This conveys to the horizontally striving growth, on the one hand, the vitality of the nutritive humus and the formative force of the