Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/360/en

This threefold nature of the body is most clearly developed in the insects. In the other three groups, one functional domain dominates the life of the animal in high specialisation: in worms, the metabolic pole; in fishes, the rhythmic middle; in birds, the head or nerve-sense pole. Each of these four groups reveals in its species diversity — most intensely in the insects — a wide range in the differentiation of its organ systems. Compared with the human being, they have already in earlier phases of evolution formed themselves one-sidedly to such a high degree of completion that one can say: a part of the soul element of these animals has been largely absorbed into their respective bodily formation, while the other, complementary part lives itself forth supersensibly as the world of the so-called elemental beings. Elemental beings are messengers who mediate between the essential ground of all being and its image-like manifestations in the physical-material world. Their nature is of a soul-astral kind; their body is built up in each case specifically from the forces of the etheric-living. The elemental beings are the spirit-messengers who draw the archetypal images — those of the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, at home in the realm of the higher spiritual worlds — into sense-perceptible appearance in time and space, shaping them in image-likeness. They are beings of relationship between the world of the sensory and the spiritually supersensible, and as such can be experienced in feeling, through a practised, thinking beholding. As bearers of process, they enchant themselves into everything that is becoming, and free themselves from this enchantment as what has congealed into sensory form passes away. The elemental beings differentiate into four groups, according to which of the four elements — earth, water, air, and warmth — each has its primary field of activity.

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