Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1607/en

The cytoplasm is the movement pole of the cell. It streams, rotates around the cell vacuoles — or, in special cases, even circulates around the cell nucleus. The intensity of streaming depends on oxygen, the bearer of the etheric forces. It is sensitive to external stimuli; it ensures — depending on the weather, through the swelling and shrinking of the cell tissues — the closing and opening of the stomata, the movement of the flower heads of the composites in accordance with the course of the Sun, and so forth. It reacts, further, to the kind of manuring and to the tending hand of the human being. As the stamp impresses itself into the sealing wax, so do the astral forces pressing in from without impress themselves into the cytoplasm of the cell. In the science of botany, a "faculty of sensation" is attributed to the cell plasma. Yet no one names its specifically plant-like character — the boundary-drawing threshold to animal sensation. In the cell nucleus phosphorus prevails and determines its strict structures. The protein associated with it, the nucleoprotein, contains — as does all protein in principle — no phosphorus. Protein is associated with sulphur; it owes its substance-composing mobility to sulphur, which stands so close to phosphorus in kinship and yet is so polar in its properties. But sulphur is the mediator between the astral forces raying in from the periphery and the substances that build up the protein (C, O, N, H). Both — sulphur and phosphorus — bring about a harmonisation of the members of the human being. When, for instance, the astral body and with it the I sink too deeply into the etheric and physical organisation, then "sulphur works more upon the astral body, phosphorus more upon the I," drawing each back out of that binding. Both are Mercuries between the higher spirit worlds and their earthly image — between what is spiritually germinal and what works itself out into physical appearance, into the Work. Both appear, in highest dilution, in all living activity — unified and yet in polar working-mode, repeating the past in the present and opening it toward the future. Both are, in high dilution, interwoven into the nucleus (phosphorus) and the plasma (sulphur) of the cell. Their