Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1183/en

stable humus in combination with the lime — thus the fertilising forces peculiar to plant compost. This holds equally for the finely branching lateral root-work spreading itself out into breadth. It is otherwise with taproot, culm, stem and trunk. Their vertical impulse is grounded in substance not by humus as manure, but by the crystalline of quartz, the silicates and clay minerals (cf. the chapter "The Origin of Clay Minerals and Their New Formation", p. 209 ff.). These silica minerals mediate the raying-in forces of the sun, the planets and fixed stars by an indirect path. These gather themselves, through the working of the clay minerals, into the "cosmic upward streaming" within the plants. The I of the human being, his spirit being, gives him the force of uprightness; the animal is animal because it does not possess this force in its fullness; it has, however — as the cattle in a particular way — "the I as disposition." The plant, rooted fast in the earth, shapes its vertical form in "cosmic upward streaming" as the image of its supersensible spirit being. Animal manure is now able — so one may surmise — by virtue of the "I-disposition" woven into it through the astral body and etheric body of the animal, to make the plant being more independent in relation to its being held within the locally given conditions of the heights and the depths. Through the dung, the disposition is mediated to the plant to individualize itself even into its outward form-building, to connect itself more strongly, in its own essential nature, with the workings of earth and cosmos. Seen thus, one must — as already indicated — attribute above all to cattle manure, with regard to the living context of soil and plants, an "educative" capacity.