Youth's Search in Nature

Let us look now at this human being: he takes in outer material substance and has no inkling of what he is taking in with the plant, what he is taking in from outside with the cultivated plants. He is ignorant about what he takes in from outside. And now it begins to work within him through the power of the gods. It has already begun to work when he transforms what he takes in from outside into taste on the tongue. Of this process, by which things are transformed, he still retains something of mere sense experience. Then it leaves his consciousness, and a mighty, wisdom-filled process sets in. Everything is transformed within the human being, making it possible for us to be able to grasp the spirit. What we thus work over unconsciously finally ends up in the dung heap that fills our brain. Let us learn to think that as human beings we are urged to offer this dung to the world in the right way, that we do not use it in such a way as to want to transform compressed dung into little machines for children! It is mainly in this way that the human being of the present day uses his brain. He does not manure the fields of the spirit with his brain so that the spirit might work in them; he makes mechanisms out of everything. You see, you must know what the brain is intended for—to manure the fields of the spirit for the gods that come down to human beings—and you must thereby acquire the chaste reverence that can arise out of such an inward contemplation of these matters. If you thus learn to intimate what takes place in the unconscious and in the subconscious and then begin to take up nature, formed in accordance with the image of man, into your knowledge, thereby beholding nature really in connection with the dung, you can see how within nature—slowly, gradually—there rises into consciousness something that otherwise works unconsciously within the human being. Then you learn truly to renew out of yourself what has endured for a long time only as tradition, what was belief and, like so many things that had to be propagated out of the ancient clairvoyant age—still penetrated by nature—lives unintelligibly in Roman sayings such as, "Naturalia non turpia sunt" ("All things in nature are beautiful"). If they do not appear beautiful, it is only because man cannot see their beauty, cannot sense their fragrance.