8. The Elementary World and its Beings

I may have already mentioned here an older scientist with whom an anthroposophical conversation years ago was downright exasperating. The person in question is an exceptionally learned botanist. Well, I was so naive, or thought I had to be naive for certain reasons, that I thought the best way to talk to this gentleman about anthroposophy would be to start with botany. So I spoke to the scholar about the essence of plants, the essence of flowering, the essence of germination, in such a way that these individual things pointed to anthroposophy. It did not occur to him to take an interest in this. On the other hand, he was interested in—and very well versed in—all the descriptions that came from the Theosophical Society about the etheric body, the astral body, and so on. For heaven's sake, he thought to himself, I have to lecture on botany and explain plants to my university students in the botanical cabinet; yes, if anthroposophy comes into play there, it will be a fatal story. That won't do, it must be protected from that; I have to be a respectable professor who is not so different from the others. — Therefore, he was not at all interested in how I could talk about plants from an anthroposophical point of view, even though he is a botanist. Yes, one had to speak quite separately from the etheric body and the astral body and, in his opinion, preferably from Kama-Manas and Budhi-Manas and so on, and one could already talk to him about races and rounds, because so-called empirical research does not go that far.