6. New Spiritual Impulses in History, Their Rejection by the Materialistic World Conception, Result of the Catastrophic Events of the Great War

If you try to picture this very vividly, you can see a kind of elementary life rising out of the earth; in this elementary life we ourselves are embedded with our own soul. But we are in this elementary life more intensely still, for we take part in the process I have just mentioned. As human beings we participate very intensely in this process, and also the animals take part in this. How? Well, there is no difference between that which happens when a certain quantity of fish eggs are laid in the sea—eggs that do not develop and only give rise to elementary existence—and that which happens when we see the seeds growing out of the earth, let us say wheat. How many grains of wheat are predestined to become wheat halms,[^1] and yet they do not grow into halms because we eat them! In this case we ourselves and our processes are linked up with the universe; we connect ourselves with what arises as elementary existence.