The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The Spirit in the Plant Kingdom

[ 1 ] How spiritual science must recognize the spirit that lives and weaves within all beings surrounding us—if it proceeds solely from the principle that the knowing human being should understand himself in his own act of knowing—has been mentioned in the lectures on “The Human Soul and the Animal Soul” and “The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit.” It has been said that, fundamentally speaking, the self-aware human being could never conceive of incorporating into his own spirit—as spiritual content—ideas, concepts, and representations of things and entities if these concepts and ideas—this spiritual content through which the human being seeks to understand what lies within things—were not first present in the things themselves, were not already embedded within them. Any extraction of the spiritual from things and entities would be pure fantasy, a self-invented fantasy, if one did not presuppose that everywhere we look—and from which we can draw the spirit—this spirit is also present. Now one may well say that—even if only in small circles—this general presupposition regarding the spiritual content of the world is nevertheless already widely held. But even among those who speak of the spirit in things, they generally limit themselves, so to speak, to speaking of this spirit in general—that is, to speaking of the fact that all mineral, plant, and animal life, and so on, is underlaid by spiritual weaving, by spiritual life. But to go into the way in which the spirit manifests itself to us in specific ways, how it expresses itself in particular forms of existence—this is something that is not yet considered in the broadest circles of our current education. People essentially take great offense at those who not only speak of the spirit in general, but who speak of the specific forms, the specific kinds of spirit, as it asserts itself behind this or that phenomenon. Nevertheless, within the framework of our spiritual science, we must not speak of the spirit merely in such a vague, general way as has just been indicated, but in such a way that we recognize: how does the spirit weave its work behind mineral or plant existence, and how in animal and human existence?

[ 2 ] The purpose of today’s reflection is to say a few words about the nature of the spirit in the plant kingdom. One must admit that if one proceeds not from abstract philosophy or abstract theosophy, but rather from an unbiased observation of reality—and at the same time — as must indeed be the case on the sound foundation of spiritual science — stands firmly on the ground of natural science and wishes to speak of the “spirit in the plant kingdom,” then one not only—I would say—encounters unwarranted prejudices of our scientific and other contemporary thinking, but one also encounters more or less justified conceptions that have a strong suggestive effect and must necessarily have such an effect. Precisely in this line of thought, which is meant to deal with the spirit that finds its expression—its physiognomy, as it were—in the realm that confronts us, ranging from the gigantic trees of the primeval forest or those that have survived for millennia on Tenerife, all the way to the small violet that hides modestly in the quiet forest or elsewhere, —precisely in such a contemplation, one finds oneself in a rather difficult position once one has internalized the scientific concepts of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one finds oneself in a rather difficult position once one has worked through what is to be said about the spirit in this field. For how could one deny that great and marvelous discoveries in the field of material research—including in the field of botany—were made in the nineteenth century, discoveries that, from a certain standpoint, shed deep light on the essence of plant nature? We must repeatedly recall how, in the second third of the nineteenth century, the great botanist Schleiden made the discovery of the plant cell—that is, he first presented to humanity the truth that every plant body is composed of small—what are often called elementary organisms—independent entities, cells, which appear to be the building blocks of this plant body. Whereas previously one had been able to observe plants only in terms of their gross parts and organs, attention was now directed to how every leaf of higher plants consists of countless such tiny, microscopic structures—the plant cells. And how could one be surprised that such a discovery had a profound and far-reaching influence on the entire way of thinking about and perceiving the plant world? After all, it is only natural that anyone who first observed how the plant body is constructed from these building blocks would come to the conclusion that, by studying these tiny structures—these building blocks—one could, in essence, uncover the very secret of plant nature. The brilliant Gustav Theodor Fechner had to learn this firsthand; in the mid-nineteenth century, he did indeed attempt to incorporate into his line of thought something like the “plant soul,” although one might say that his overly fanciful speculations about the nature of plants perhaps came a little too early. Fechner spoke of a soul of the plant in a comprehensive sense, for example in his book *Nanna*, and he did not speak merely as a fantasist, but as a thorough and profound connoisseur of the scientific advances of the nineteenth century. But he could not help but conceive of plants not merely as structures composed of cells; rather, when he observed the forms and features of individual plants, he was compelled to assume that the sensory reality was the expression of an underlying spiritual essence.

[ 3 ] It must be said, however, that compared to what spiritual science has to say today about the life of the spirit in the plant kingdom, what one finds in Fechner’s writings does indeed seem quite fanciful; yet his ideas represented a breakthrough. Nevertheless, Fechner had to learn firsthand the resistance that can arise precisely from the very way of thinking into which the human spirit had penetrated through the discoveries of the nineteenth century. One must fairly acknowledge and understand that even the greatest minds, when they saw under the microscope how the plant body is a structure of tiny cells, were fascinated by this sight and could not at all imagine how anyone could still come up with the idea of speaking of a “plant soul” after the material had revealed itself in such a magnificent way to the inquiring human mind. Therefore, we must understand that it was precisely the researcher of the plant cell who became the greatest and most vehement opponent of what Fechner sought to say about the spiritual nature of plants. And there is a certain charm in seeing the refined and subtle Fechner locked in battle with Schleiden—who had become famous in botany for his epoch-making discovery—but who, in a crudely materialistic manner, dismisses everything Fechner sought to say about plants based on his intimate observations. In such a battle between Fechner and Schleiden in the nineteenth century, something is essentially taking place that every soul navigating the science of our time must feel as it works its way through the doubts and mysteries that inevitably arise precisely when one engages with the achievements of the natural sciences. One will have serious doubts as to whether, so to speak, one can free oneself from the sometimes quite compelling notions in such a field. To those unfamiliar with the compelling nature of nineteenth-century materialistic scientific ideas, what is said from the perspective of a worldview that seeks to stand on the firm ground of natural science may sometimes seem trivial, perhaps even petty. But for those who approach the matter with a sound sense of truth and a serious need to solve life’s mysteries—and who are at the same time equipped with the concepts of nineteenth-century botany—a certain inner spiritual tragedy may emerge. I shall merely hint at some of this. For example, one learns to recognize what nineteenth-century botany has contributed. There is indeed much that is magnificent and truly astonishing in it. Then the person who approaches these scientific concepts with such a sound sense of truth finds, on the one hand, that these concepts have a suggestive, immense power over him—that they do not let him go, but whisper in his ear again and again: You’re making a mistake if you leave the safe path where one traces how cell relates to cell, how cell is nourished by cell, and so on. Ultimately, the necessity arises to break free from materialistic concepts in this field. There is simply no other way, especially given the scientific premises, no matter how much one might want to cling to the suggestive power of worldviews that merely follow external materialistic notions. It is no longer possible to depart from a certain point. Not many people are willing to take that latter step today. The former step is taken by the vast majority of those who are fascinated by the findings of natural science and do not dare to go even one step beyond what the microscope reveals. Very few take the other step. But it becomes clear to anyone who maintains a healthy sense of truth precisely on the ground of the natural sciences—and this is necessary if one wishes to approach the spirit in the plant kingdom—that one must first grapple with a certain concept; otherwise, one will always go astray, will always enter a labyrinth into which Fechner also entered, despite his great efforts to examine with subtlety the symbolic and physiognomic aspects of individual plant forms and structures. I would like to begin by bringing what is essential here to your attention once more through a comparison.

[ 4 ] Suppose someone were to find, by one means or another, some part of a material object, some piece of matter. If he examines this piece of matter, as it appears to him, in certain cases, he may never be able to make sense of it. Why not? If this material fragment is a piece of bone from a human arm, the person in question, if he merely looks at this piece of bone and tries to explain it in and of itself, will not be able to make sense of it. For nowhere in the entire world would it be possible for this material fragment to come into being without the presupposition of a human arm. One cannot even speak of it unless one conceives of it in connection with an entire human organism. Thus, it is impossible for us to speak of such a structure that presents itself to us in any way other than in connection with a whole being. Another comparison might be the following. We find somewhere a structure that is a human hair. If we were to explain how it must have come into being right where it lies, we would be completely mistaken, for we can explain it only by considering it in connection with an entire human organism. On its own, it is nothing; on its own, it is inexplicable.

[ 5 ] This is something the researcher of the spirit must bear in mind with regard to the entire scope of our observations and our explanations. He must examine every single thing that presents itself to him to determine whether it can be considered in and of itself, or whether it remains inexplicable in and of itself, whether it does not belong to something else—or, rather, whether it can be regarded as an individuality in its own right. Curiously, it becomes apparent to the spiritual researcher that it is utterly impossible to ever regard the plant world—this marvelous covering of the Earth—as something existing in and of itself. The spiritual observer feels toward the plant covering just as he feels toward a finger, which he can only regard as belonging to a whole human organism. The plant world cannot be regarded in isolation for this very reason: to the spiritual researcher’s gaze, it immediately joins itself to the entire Earth and forms a whole with it, just as a finger does with our organism, or a piece of bone or the brain with our organism. And anyone who considers plants in isolation, on their own, is doing the same thing as someone who would try to explain a hand or a piece of human bone in isolation. The entire plant kingdom can be regarded in no other way than as a part of our entire Earth.

[ 6 ] This, however, brings us to a point that may be frustrating for many today, but which nevertheless holds true from the perspective of spiritual research. We are led to view our entire planet Earth differently than it is usually viewed by modern science. For modern science—be it astronomy, geology, or mineralogy—fundamentally speaks of the Earth only in the sense that this globe is composed of rocks, minerals, and the inanimate. Spiritual science must not speak in this way. It can only speak in such a way that everything found on our Earth—everything that, so to speak, a being descending from outer space onto our Earth would find in the form of humans, animals, plants, and stones—belongs to the whole of our Earth just as the stones themselves belong to our Earth. This means that we must not regard the Earth merely as a dead structure of rock, but as something that is a living whole in itself, which brings forth plant beings from within itself just as the human being produces the structures of his skin, his sense organs, and the like. In other words: we must not consider the Earth without its associated vegetation.

[ 7 ] Even an external circumstance could point out to people that, just as every stone belongs to the earth in a certain sense, so too does every plant belong to it. For just as every stone, every inanimate object, demonstrates its connection to the Earth by being able to fall to the Earth, where it finds support, so too does every plant demonstrate its connection to the Earth in that the direction of the plant’s stem always passes through the center of the Earth. All plant stems would intersect at the center of the Earth if we extended them to the center of the Earth; that is to say, the Earth is capable of drawing from its center all the rays of force that the plants emit from within themselves. Otherwise, we are merely considering an abstraction, a figment of the imagination, when we examine the mineral kingdom without including the plant cover. It so happens that natural science, which focuses purely on the external material realm, is very fond of discussing how all life—including plant life—must have once arisen from the inanimate, the mineral realm. For the spiritual researcher, this question does not even arise, because the subordinate, the lower, is never the prerequisite for the higher; rather, the higher, the animate, is always the prerequisite for the lower, the inanimate. We will see later in the lecture “What Does Geology Have to Say About the Origin of the World?” that spiritual science shows how everything stony and mineral—from granite to topsoil—came into being in a similar way to how natural science still believes coal did. For coal is a mineral today; we dig it out of the earth. What was it, even by the standards of natural science, millions of years ago? Vast, mighty forests—so says natural science—covered a large part of the Earth’s surface at that time; later, during geological upheavals, they sank into the Earth, underwent chemical transformations in terms of their material composition, and what we excavate from the depths of the Earth today are those plants that have turned to stone. If one acknowledges this today in relation to coal, one will no longer find it all that ridiculous when spiritual science, through the methods it employs, concludes that all rock contained within our Earth ultimately originated from plants—that, so to speak, the plant first had to turn to stone—so that it is not the stony that is the prerequisite for the plant, but rather, conversely, the plant that is the prerequisite for the mineral. Everything mineral is first a hardening, then a fossilization of the plant.

[ 8 ] Thus, we also have before us, in the Earth planet, something about which we must assume: that it was once, in terms of its densest quality, of a plant nature—a structure composed of plant beings—and that the inanimate developed from this living substance only as it successively hardened, lignified, and fossilized. Just as our skeletal system, which, strictly speaking, also first separates itself from the organism, so too must we regard the rock structure as the great skeletal system of the Earth being, of the Earth organism.

[ 9 ] Now, if we examine this Earth organism from the perspective of spiritual science, we can go even further. Today I can only outline the very first steps in this direction, for we are dealing with a series of lectures in which one topic must build upon the next. We may ask ourselves: What is the nature of the Earth organism as such?

[ 10 ] We know that when we observe an organism, it alternately exhibits different states. The human and animal organisms alternately exhibit states of wakefulness and sleep over time. Can we now find something similar, from the perspective of spiritual science, for the earthly body, for the earthly organism? At first glance, what follows may seem like a comparison, but for spiritual research it is not a comparison but a fact. When we observe the unique law of summer and winter on Earth—how it manifests itself with summer on one half of the globe and winter on the other, and how this relationship alternates— and if we take a look at how it differs—as wintertime and summertime—in relation to the whole life of the Earth, it will no longer seem absurd when spiritual science tells us that winter and summer correspond, for the Earth organism, to the waking and sleeping of the organisms we ourselves have around us. The Earth simply does not sleep in the same way over time as other organisms; rather, it is always awake somewhere and always asleep somewhere within its being. Waking and sleeping move back and forth: the Earth sleeps in the part where it is summer; it is awake with a part of its being where it is winter. Thus, the entire Earth organism stands before us spiritually, with states such as waking and sleeping, just like any other organism.

[ 11 ] The summer state of the Earth organism consists, after all, in a very special relationship between the Earth and the Sun, namely that the Earth enters into such a relationship with the Sun’s influence—and we may say this because we are dealing with a living, spirit-filled organism—that it surrenders itself to an influence that emanates spiritually from the Sun. During the winter state, the Earth organism closes itself off from this solar influence, withdrawing, as it were, into itself. Let us now compare this state to the human state of sleep. I will now speak, outwardly speaking, of a mere analogy; but spiritual science provides the evidence for this fact.

[ 12 ] Let us observe a person in the evening, when they are tired, as their consciousness sinks, as all the thoughts and feelings that have entered our soul during the day through external events—all pleasure and suffering, joys and pains—sink into an indefinite darkness. During this time, the human spirit—as we showed in the lecture on “The Nature of Sleep”—leaves the physical human body and enters the spiritual world, becoming absorbed in the spiritual world. In this state of sleep, the only thing unique to humans is that they lose consciousness. To the spiritual researcher—we shall see how he knows this—it becomes evident that the human inner being, the astral body and the “I,” does indeed withdraw from the physical body and the etheric body, but it does not merely withdraw and hover above it like a cloud formation; rather, this human inner being expands and pours out over the entire planetary world that surrounds us. As improbable as it may seem, it is nevertheless evident that the human soul pours out as a unified whole into the astral realm. Researchers who were well-versed in this field knew full well why they called what emerges the astral body—namely, because this inner being draws from the celestial space, with which it forms a unity, the forces it needs to replenish what the day’s toil and labor have depleted in the physical body. Thus, in sleep, the human being merges into the great world; in the morning, he withdraws once more within the confines of his skin, into the small human world, into the microcosm. There, because the body offers him resistance, he feels his “I,” his self-consciousness, once again.

[ 13 ] This exhalation and re-inhalation of the soul is the wondrous interplay of human life. Of all those who have not spoken directly from the occult, spiritual-scientific standpoint, I have actually found only one mind that has made such an apt remark about the interplay of waking and sleeping that it can be directly incorporated into spiritual science, because it corresponds to the spiritual-scientific reality. Admittedly, it was a thorough mathematical thinker—yet a man of profound insight—who understood how to embrace nature magnificently with his spirit: Novalis. He says: “Sleep is a blended state of the body and the soul. In sleep, body and soul are chemically united. In sleep, the soul is evenly distributed throughout the body—the human being is neutralized. Waking is a divided—polar—state. In wakefulness, the soul is punctated—localized. Sleep is the digestion of the soul; the body digests the soul. (Withdrawal of the soul’s stimulus.)—Wakefulness is a state in which the soul’s stimulus takes effect—the body enjoys the soul. In sleep, the bonds of the system are loose—in wakefulness, they are tightened.”

[ 14 ] For Novalis, then, sleep means the digestion of the soul by the body. Novalis is always aware that, in sleep, the soul does indeed become one with the universe and is digested, so that human beings can better cope with the physical world.

[ 15 ] Thus, in terms of their inner being, human beings change in such a way that, when awake during the day, they contract into the small world—within the boundaries of their skin—and at night they expand into the great world, drawing strength through devotion from the world in which they are embedded. For we cannot understand human beings unless we understand them as having emerged from the entire macrocosm.

[ 16 ] As for the part of the Earth that is in summer, the situation is similar to that of a person who is asleep. The Earth surrenders itself to everything that comes down from the Sun and takes on the form it is meant to have under the influence of the Sun’s activity. As for the part of the Earth where it is winter, it closes itself off from the sun’s influence and lives within itself. It is as if a person were withdrawn into their small, inner world and living within themselves, whereas for the part of the Earth where it is summer, it is as if a person were devoted to the entire outer world.

[ 17 ] Now there is a law of the spiritual world that states: when we consider spiritual entities that are further apart from one another—such as, for example, the human being on one side and the Earth organism on the other—we must conceive of their states of consciousness as, in a certain sense, reversed. For the human being, stepping out into the great world is the state of sleep. For the Earth, the summer state—which one might perhaps call a waking state—is something that can really only be compared to what falling asleep is for the human being. When a human falls asleep, they step out into the great world; when summer arrives, the Earth, with all its forces, enters the sphere of the Sun’s influence—but we must conceive of the Earth and the Sun as spirit-filled organisms.

[ 18 ] In winter, when the Earth rests within itself, we must conceive of its state as corresponding to the waking state of human beings, whereas one might be accustomed to viewing what the Earth is in winter as the Earth’s sleep. But when we consider entities that are far apart—such as humans and the Earth—their states of consciousness appear to be, in a sense, opposite.

[ 19 ] What, then, is it that the Earth undergoes under the influence of devotion to the Solar Being, to the Solar Spirit? It is nothing other than something that can be compared spiritually—and to make the comparison easier, we would do well to reverse the terms—to the state of a human being when he wakes up in the morning and emerges from the dark bosom of existence, from the night, into his joys and sorrows. When the Earth enters the sphere of the Sun’s influence, then—although it can be compared to a human’s state of sleep—all the forces that spring forth from the Earth can transform the Earth’s dormant winter state into its active, living summer state.

[ 20 ] What, then, are plants within the entire fabric of existence? We might say: As spring approaches, the Earth organism begins to think and feel, because the sun, through its beings, draws out its thoughts and feelings. For the Earth organism, plants are nothing other than a kind of sensory organ that awakens anew every spring so that the Earth organism can be present with its thinking and feeling within the sphere of the sun’s activity. Just as light creates the eye within the human organism so that it can appear as “light” through the eye, so too does the solar organism create the expansive blanket of vegetation on the Earth organism every spring in order to observe, feel, sense, and think through this blanket of vegetation. It is not that the plants can be called the Earth’s thoughts in and of themselves, but they are the organs through which the Earth’s organization, awakening in spring, develops its feelings and thoughts in union with the Sun. Just as we see our nerves extending from the brain and how our eyes and ears, together with the nerves, develop our life of sensation and imagination, so the spiritual researcher sees in what takes place between the Earth and the Sun—with the help of the plants—the wondrous weaving of a cosmic world of thought, feeling, and sensation. For the spiritual researcher, the Earth is not only surrounded by the mineral Earth air—the purely physical Earth atmosphere—but also by an aura of thoughts and feelings. In spiritual science, the Earth is a spiritual being, and thoughts and feelings awaken every spring and flow through the soul of our entire Earth throughout the summer. The plant world, however, which is part of our entire Earth organism, provides the organs that enable our Earth to think and feel. Plants are woven into the spirit of the Earth just as our eyes and ears are woven into the workings of our own spirit. Thus, in spring, a living, spirit-filled organism awakens, and in the plants we see something that pushes its way forth from the face of our Earth, where it seeks to begin feeling and thinking in a particular region. And just as everything within us humans tends toward a self-conscious “I,” so it is in the plant world as well. The entire plant world belongs to the Earth. I have already said that a person would have to be close to madness not to realize how everything within us—our sensations, perceptions, and feelings—is directed toward our “I.” Thus, everything that plants convey during the summer months is directed toward the center of the Earth, which is the Earth’s “I.” This is not meant merely as a symbol! Just as a human being has an “I,” so does the Earth have its self-conscious “I.” That is why all plants strive toward the center of the Earth. Consequently, we must not view plants in isolation, but must consider them in relation to the Earth’s self-conscious “I.” What unfolds as the Earth’s thoughts and sensations is akin to how sensations and ideas live within us, to what surges and ebbs within us during waking hours, and to what lives within us on the astral plane, to use spiritual scientific terminology.

[ 21 ] Thus, we cannot conceive of the Earth merely as a physical entity. For the physical entity is to us something like our own physical body—one that can be seen with the physical eyes and touched with the hands, and which is observed by external science; such is the Earth’s body as studied by modern astronomy or geology. Then there is what we have come to know in human beings as the etheric body or life body. The Earth, too, has such an etheric body. And finally, it also has an astral body. This is what awakens every spring as the thoughts and feelings of the Earth, which recede as winter approaches, so that the Earth then rests, withdrawn into itself, within its own “I,” preserving only what it needs to carry over the past into the future through memory, and preserving within the seed forces of the plants what it has acquired. Just as a person, when falling asleep, does not lose his thoughts and feelings but rediscovers them the next morning, so too does the Earth, awakening from its slumber in spring, find the seed forces of the plants in order to bring forth from its living memory that which is the achievement of earlier times.

[ 22 ] Viewed in this way, plants can be compared to what our eyes and ears—our senses—are to us. That is what they are to the Earth organism. But what perceives, what attains consciousness—that is the spiritual world streaming down from the sun to the earth. This spiritual world could not attain consciousness if it did not have its organs in the plants, which convey self-consciousness just as our eyes, ears, and nerves convey our self-consciousness. This draws our attention to the fact that we are actually only speaking correctly when we say: Those beings that stream down from the Sun to the Earth and unfold their spiritual activity encounter, from spring through the summer, the being that belongs to the Earth itself. In this exchange, the organs are formed through which the Earth perceives them, for it is not the plant that perceives. — It is a superstition—even on the part of natural science—to say that the plant perceives. — The spiritual beings associated with the Earth’s and the Sun’s activities perceive through the plant organs, and they therefore direct all the organs they need to connect them to the Earth’s center toward the Earth’s center. What we see behind the canopy of plants, then, are the spiritual beings that surround the Earth and have their organs within the plants.

[ 23 ] It is so remarkable in our time that the natural sciences are practically pushing us to acknowledge these aspects of the spiritual sciences. For it is nothing less than the full recognition of the fact that our physical Earth is only a part of the entire Earth, that the gaseous solar sphere is also only a part of the entire Sun, and that our Sun, as it appears to us physically, is only a part of the spiritual-soul entities that interact with the spiritual-soul entities of the Earth. Just as the human world is connected to its environment and just as human beings have their organs for living and developing, so do these entities—which are real and truly existent—create an organ within the plant kingdom to perceive themselves. Superstition—I said—is believing that the plant perceives as such or that an individual plant possesses a kind of soul. This is just as much a superstition as speaking of the soul of an eye. Nevertheless, through a curious chain of facts—which is, however, self-evident to spiritual science—external science was, throughout the entire nineteenth century, inevitably compelled to acknowledge what has now been said; yet it is indeed the case that external science has known very little about this field, even to this day. For what science has achieved so far regarding the sensory life of plants is entirely a confirmation of what I have just said about the spirit and its activity in the plant kingdom; yet in conventional science, this cannot be recognized as such. We can see this in the following example.

[ 24 ] In 1804, Sydenham Edwards discovered the remarkable nature of the Venus flytrap, which has certain bristles on its leaves. When an insect comes near this plant, causing it to make contact with the bristles, the insect is enveloped by the leaf, devoured, and digested. It was remarkable when people discovered that plants can eat, can even swallow animals whole, and are carnivorous! But no one really knew what to make of it. It’s interesting that they couldn’t make sense of it, because this discovery was repeatedly forgotten and rediscovered—for example, in 1818 by Nuttall, in 1834 by Curtis, in 1848 by Lindley, and in 1859 by Oudemans. Five people in a row made the same discovery! Science could make no further use of this finding, except that Schleiden—who rendered such meritorious service to the study of the plant world—warned against falling into all sorts of mystical notions, such as attributing a soul to plants! But even today, the scientific community is once again willing to ascribe a soul to individual plants—such as the Venus flytrap, for example—which would, however, be a superstition, just as if one were to ascribe a soul to the eye. People like Raoul Franc&, for example, have taken such things at face value and said: “Here we see something spiritual that resembles the spirituality of an animal!”

[ 25 ] This demonstrates the necessity of not succumbing to fantasy, especially in the field of spiritual science; for here, external science has fallen into fantasy when it seeks to ascribe to the Venus flytrap a spiritual being that can be equated with the human or animal spiritual being. Then one might also ascribe a soul to another creature that attracts other beings—including small animals—and, once they have come within its reach, wraps its tentacles around them so that they are trapped inside. For if one speaks of a soul in the case of the Venus flytrap, one could just as well say that a mousetrap has a soul. But we must not speak that way. As soon as one wishes to penetrate the spirit, one must consider things precisely and accurately and not conclude from an outward appearance that seems similar that the inner workings proceed in the same way.

[ 26 ] I have already pointed out that some animals exhibit something similar to memory. If an elephant is led to a watering hole and is teased by a person along the way, it may happen that, when it returns, it has retained water in its trunk and now sprays the person who teased it earlier. People then say: “So you see, the elephant has a memory; it remembered the person who teased it and decided: ‘On the way back, I’ll spray him with water!’” But that is not the case. When it comes to the life of the soul, it is important that we closely follow the inner process and not immediately speak of memory when an event occurs later as the effect of an earlier cause. Only when a being truly looks back on something that happened in the past are we dealing with memory; in every other case, we are dealing merely with cause and effect. This means that we would now have to look closely into the structure of the elephant’s soul if we wanted to see how the stimulus that is applied triggers something that still produces an effect after a certain amount of time.

[ 27 ] That is why we must say: We must not interpret phenomena such as those we encounter in the Venus flytrap in any other way than that the plant’s entire structure is not intended to give rise to an inner soul-being of the plant; rather, what takes place there is brought about from the outside. The plant serves as an organ of the entire Earth organism, even for such a purpose. This nineteenth-century research in particular has shown how plants belong, on the one hand, to the Earth’s “I” and, on the other hand, to the Earth’s aura—the astral body, the world of the Earth’s sensations and feelings. One is truly grateful to those natural scientists—such as Gottlieb Haberlandt—who simply present the facts they have researched in a matter-of-fact way, rather than—like Raoul France or others—drawing purely external conclusions from them. If he were to limit himself to simply presenting things as they are, one could truly be grateful to him; but if he wishes to draw conclusions from this about the inner life of a single plant, he might as well draw conclusions about the inner life of a single hair or tooth.

[ 28 ] If we then consider those plants that are in fact spikelet plants, it becomes apparent that all of these plants possess peculiar little organs. Small structures consisting of starch cells have been discovered. Curiously, these cells are constructed in such a way that their interior contains something like a loose nucleus. What is peculiar is that the cell wall remains impervious to the core in only one spot. If the core slips elsewhere, it comes into contact with the cell wall, and as a result, the plant returns it to its original position. Such starch cells are found in all plants that point in their main direction toward the center of the Earth, so that the plant possesses an organ within itself that always enables it to orient itself in its main direction toward the center of the Earth. This is indeed a marvelous phenomenon, discovered by various researchers over the course of the nineteenth century, and one that is best understood when the facts are presented simply. For example, when Haberlandt suggests that this involves a kind of sensory perception on the part of the plant, he nevertheless sets out the facts so clearly that one must be particularly grateful for this dry and sober presentation.

[ 29 ] But now for something else. When you look at a plant leaf, the outer surface is actually always a collection of tiny lens-like structures, similar to the lens of our eye. These lenses are arranged in such a way that light only has an effect when it strikes the surface of the leaf from a very specific direction. If the light strikes from a different direction, the leaf is immediately prompted to turn so that the light can fall into the center of the lens, because the light acts differently when it strikes from the side. Thus, there are organs for light on the surface of plant leaves. These light-sensing organs, which can indeed be compared to a kind of eye spread across the plants—through which, however, the plant does not see, but rather the solar being looks through them upon the earthly being—cause the plant leaves to always tend to position themselves perpendicular to the incoming sunlight.

[ 30 ] In this—the way the plant surrenders to the sun’s influence in spring and summer—we find a second main aspect of the plant. The direction of the stem, through which plants prove themselves to belong to the Earth’s self-consciousness, is one; the other is that through which plants express the Earth’s surrender to the activity of the solar beings.

[ 31 ] If we were to go even further, we would have to conclude—assuming the arguments presented so far are correct—that through this surrender of the Earth to the Sun, the plants somehow express how the Earth, through what it brings forth, truly lives within the great macrocosm. We would have to perceive, so to speak, something in the plants that would indicate to us that what is actually brought about outside by the solar beings is having an effect on the plant world. Linn himself pointed out that certain plants bloom at five o’clock in the morning and at no other time. This means: the Earth is devoted to the Sun, and this is expressed by the fact that, in certain plants, blooming is possible only at very specific times of day. For example, Hemerocallis fulva, the daylily, blooms only at five o’clock; Nymphaca alba, the water lily, only at seven o’clock; and Calendula, the marigold, only at nine o’clock. In this we see the relationship between the Earth and the Sun expressed in a wondrous way—what Linnaeus himself called the “solar clock.” Indeed, even the closing of the petals—as the flowers “fall asleep”—is limited to very specific times of day. There is a wonderful order and regularity in the life of plants.

[ 32 ] All of this shows us how the Earth is surrendered—like a sleeping human—to the great world and lives in harmony with it. The way it allows plants to bloom and wither reveals to us the entire spiritual essence and interplay that takes place between the Sun and the Earth. When we look at things this way, however, we must admit: we are peering into the deep, deep mysteries of our environment. For the serious seeker of truth, this is where the possibility ends—even if the purely material findings of research are as fascinating as they may be—of even thinking that a ball of gas is traveling through space within the Sun; it ends the possibility that the Earth may be viewed as astronomy or geology views it today. There are compelling reasons—to which even the conscientious natural philosopher must submit—that lead him to say to himself: You must no longer see anything else in what natural science reveals to you than an expression of the spiritual life underlying all things! — Then, however, we regard plants as a physiognomic expression of the Earth, as the expression of our Earth’s face. Thus, what we call our aesthetic feeling toward the plant world is deepened precisely through spiritual science. We stand before the gigantic trees of the primeval forest, before the quiet violet or snowdrop, and regard them as individual beings, to be sure, but in such a way that we say: Here the spirit that lives through space speaks to us—the spirit of the sun, the spirit of the Earth! Just as we perceive the expression of a person’s spirit when we hear their voice and infer the piety or impiety of their soul, so too do we infer from what we see in plants what lives as the Earth Spirit and the Sun Spirit, and how they stand in conflict or mutual harmony with one another. There we feel ourselves woven into and living within the spirit.

[ 33 ] And just to illustrate how the spiritual sciences can indeed be corroborated by nineteenth-century natural science, the following can be mentioned. Those in the audience who have attended previous lectures here will recall the observation that there are plants in the earthly world that are out of place, that do not belong in our earthly world. One such plant, for example, is mistletoe, which plays such a remarkable role in legend and myth precisely because it belongs to an earlier planetary state of our Earth and has remained as a remnant of a pre-Earth development. Therefore, it cannot grow in the ground but must take root in other plants. Natural science shows us that mistletoe lacks those peculiar starch cells that cause plants to point toward the center of the Earth. In short, I could now begin to dissect the entire botany of the nineteenth century piece by piece, and you would find, piece by piece, evidence that the plant cover of our Earth is the sensory organ through which the Earth Spirit and the Sun Spirit contemplate one another.

[ 34 ] When we bear this in mind, we gain—as indeed seems fitting for the plant world we love and which brings us joy—a science that can both uplift our souls and bring us closer to this plant world. We feel that our own souls and spirits belong to the Earth and the Sun, and we feel as if we were, so to speak, looking up to the plant world, just as it belongs to our great Earth Mother. In essence, we must do so. For everything that, as an animal or human being, appears to be independent of the sun’s direct influence is, through the plant world—and by virtue of its dependence on the plant world—indirectly dependent on the sun once again. Although human beings do not undergo the same transformations in winter and summer as plants do, it is the plant that gives them the ability to possess that constancy within themselves. The substances that plants develop can only be produced under the influence of the sun’s action, through the interplay of the spirit of the sun and the spirit of the earth. It is carbohydrates, in particular, that arise only when the spirit of the sun and the spirit of the earth unite through the plant organism. The substances developed in this way provide what higher organisms must take in to generate heat within themselves. For it is only through the heat that higher organisms generate—by absorbing the substances prepared by the sun indirectly through the plant—that they are able to thrive.

[ 35 ] Materially speaking, we must indeed regard our Earth Mother as our great nurturer; yet we have seen that the plant kingdom reveals the physiognomy of the Earth Spirit, and through this we feel ourselves standing in spirit and soul. We gaze, as it were—just as we look into another person’s eyes—into the soul of the Earth when we understand how she reveals her soul to us in the blossoms and leaves of the plant world.

[ 36 ] This was what drew Goethe to the plant world—a pursuit that, in essence, consists of nothing other than demonstrating how the spirit is at work in the plant world, and how the leaf, which appears in the plant in one form or another, is shaped by the spirit into the most diverse forms. Goethe was delighted that the spirit within the plant shapes the leaves, rounds them, and also guides them in a spiral around the stem. And it must have been just as memorable when a person who truly recognized the spirit—Goethe—stood face to face with Schiller after a lecture by the botanist Batsch at the Natural History Society in Jena. When Schiller, who had not been satisfied with the lecture, remarked, “But that is such a one-sided view of plants!”—Goethe took out a leaf and, in his own way, sketched with a few strokes how, to him, the spirit works within the plant. Then Schiller, who could not comprehend such a concrete grasp of the spirit of plants, said, “But what you are drawing there is only an idea!” To this, Goethe could only reply: “That is very dear to me—to have ideas without knowing it, and even to see them with my own eyes!”

[ 37 ] It is precisely the way in which a person like Goethe explores the plant world—as he walks across the Brenner Pass and looks at coltsfoot with entirely different eyes, seeing in it how the spirit works upon the earth and shapes the leaves—that shows us how we can speak of a common spirit of the earth, which expresses itself only through the manifold plant beings as its special organ. What is physical is spirit. Our task is always simply to trace the spirit in the right way. Whoever traces the plant as it grows out of the Earth’s total spirit will find the Earth spirit that Goethe already had in mind when he had his Faust invoke the spirit permeating the Earth, which says of itself:

In the tides of life, in a storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
Weaving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A shifting weave,
A blazing life,
Thus I create at the whirring loom of time
And weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 38 ] But the person who thus perceives the Spirit in the plant life of the Earth feels strengthened and invigorated by seeing what he must regard as his inner being poured out over the entire realm in which he is permitted to dwell. And he must say to himself: When I look at the surroundings of my space, I find confirmation of what is the origin of all things; I find it in the bosom of the Spirit! And what can be regarded as an expression of the relationship between the human spirit and the human soul—and likewise for the relationship between the plant soul and the plant spirit—we can summarize in the words:

They speak to the human mind
The things in the vastness of space,
They change as time passes.
The human soul lives in awareness
Unlimited by the vastness of space
And untouched by the passage of time.
It finds in the realm of the spirit
The deepest foundation of its own being!