Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1460/en

as it were the idea of a comprehensive sense organ immersing itself in the sense-darkness of the metabolic process, withdrawn from consciousness. The concept «mesentery», which appears in the fifth lecture of the Agriculture Course, denotes something specific — a field of function in which the general translates itself into a highly specific activity, namely one that is found in such complete form only in the digestive tract. Its uniqueness arises from the intimate connection with the «I-disposition» discussed in the chapter "The Ox" (pp. 146 ff.). Its endowment in the ox is inscribed in the long path of intensive digestive activity, culminating in rumination. The result of this digestive unlocking of substance is perceived by the peritoneal serosa of the mesentery. It radiates as astral force into the inner body and into the blood stream, which carries it up into the nerve-sense pole of the head and into the horns seated upon it, where it is dammed back. This triggers, on a higher level, a renewed consciousness-impulse, whose result radiates back into the body cavity and communicates itself through the two serosa lamellae of the mesentery to the intestinal contents. These are now permeated by forces that, out of the ox's current life activity, have found their way to its supersensible essential reality. With excretion this force-potential — the «I-disposition» — enters the outer world. It lends cow manure its uniquely enduring fertilising force. This occurrence, arising from the higher being of the ox, may be taken as a further indication that the peritoneum represents a «general», whereas the double-lamellar mesenteric peritoneum represents a specific. The latter fulfils in the «inner heaven», in the invaginated cosmos, the core task: namely to mediate the digestive process of the ruminant to the organism, and from the organism back again to the digestive system — which then becomes the manure.