Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1408/en

In contrast to silica, Rudolf Steiner describes lime as the one that wants to «draw everything toward itself». «What lime wants to have lives in the plant world.» «The calcareous is the general outer desire within the earthly.» In this quality of the «desire-nature», the inorganically dead lime lives itself forth in its natural state. Through the life processes of plants — and in a particular way those of the oak — it is gradually freed from this bondage to the earthly. From this enlivened condition it is secreted into the bark in a state that, while approaching the mineral, nonetheless stamps the calcium oxalate embedded in the bark tissue with the impress of the oak's formative-forces organisation. Can one not see in this the meaning of the three inversion steps of the preparation — namely, that the «desire-nature» of the dead lime inverts into its opposite? Its force-configuration transforms into a condition in which it no longer wants anything for itself, but mediates to the plants forces by which they can defend themselves against the disease-inducing and damaging influences from without. The calcium in the lime is lifted by the processual steps of the preparation out of its evolutively fixed states; from a taker it becomes a giver — a healer in the life of plants.