Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/956/en

The question arises whether plants can fall ill in the same sense as animals and human beings. A direction toward an answer opens up when one takes into account the configuration of the members of the human being across the kingdoms of nature and in the human being itself: the mineral is one-membered, endowed with a physical body; to the two-memberedness of the plant — with physical body and etheric body — the animal adds as its third member the astral body, and the human being as its fourth the I-organisation. It is the astral body that is the cause of illness. No such body becomes embodied in the plant. Its soul body remains in the supersensible; it radiates its forces from the periphery into time and space, touches the plants only from without and creates for itself an image in their form. In the purity of the etheric organisation of the plant, it unites itself with the substances of the earth, enlivens these and composes them into its physical organisation. In this union it becomes, in its forms, the sense-perceptible