Eleventh Lecture

The whole relationship between so-called nature and the human organism can only be understood when one realizes that this human organism is not only a physical-soul-spiritual entity in a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization, but also when one understands, as I showed yesterday with regard to silicic acid and carbonic acid, that wherever natural substances and natural processes are found, there is a spiritually tangible spirit as the basis of these natural substances and natural processes for spiritual perception. But then one must also enter into the concrete spiritual. Just as one must distinguish in the physical between a mineral and a plant, so one must also recognize in its concreteness that which the beings of the world carry within themselves as spiritual.