Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1166/en

Just as natural science has the phenomena of the senses as its object, so spiritual research has the revelations of a spiritual world of beings. The results of the latter present themselves to thinking consciousness in idea-forms. They appear clothed in a particular wording suited to the idea. This wording is the phenomenon. The more precisely and without preconception one studies this wording, the more brightly the spiritual content of the idea shines forth in one's thinking. The first step, then, toward understanding the results of spiritual science in the eight lectures of the *Agriculture Course* is the study of the exact wording. In superficial reading one easily goes astray and finds, instead of the eagle, only individual feathers. In the Course, out of anthroposophical spiritual science and before an audience intimately acquainted with agriculture, the highest knowledge of the spirit — penetrating the kingdoms of nature — is considered in connection with concrete agricultural practice. If one strives in the study of the text for the greatest possible unprejudiced openness, then the wording in which the supersensible results are described in this way and no other is an equally given fact as any phenomenon of the senses.