LECTURE VIII.
Dornach, December 15, 1923.
GOOD
morning, Gentlemen!
Today I shall
continue the subject dealt with last time in answer to Herr Dollinger's
question. Should anything else arise, we can consider this also.
In my answer
to this question of Herr Dollinger, I spoke of the ants, and how these
creatures, bees, wasps and ants are related to one another, though
their modes of life are totally different. Taking our starting point
from this fact, we can really learn a very great deal about the whole
household of Nature, for the more one learns to understand these
small creatures and their ways, the more one realises how wisely
regulated their work is, and all they are able to accomplish in the
realm of Nature.
Last time,
I told you how the ants make their nests, how they either build up mounds
of the soil itself, or gather together minute particles of decaying wood,
or of wood which has become quite hard, and is no longer living; also
from various other substances which they mix together. Within these
ant-hills are innumerable passages, along which the ants move in
procession, whole hosts of them. One sees them coming out at the
entrances, searching their surroundings, and collecting what they
need. Sometimes however, it happens that these creatures do nct first
build up a mound, but make use of something suitable they find there
already. Perhaps, for instance, a tree has been cut down and the
stump has been left standing; an ant colony comes along and makes a
little chamber inside it, hollows it out, and makes all kind of
passages with their exits. Then perhaps, they heap up a little earth,
make one passage, then another, then a third and so on, and within
these passages are all inter-connected.
You see,
to say of all this that it is due to the instinct of the creatures may
be all very well, but nothing very much has then been said, for when the
creature cannot make use of a tree stump, it builds up a sand heap; when
it finds a suitable tree stump, then it so arranges the matter that it
saves the labour that would be needed to heap up a hillock. The small
creature adjusts itself to the individual situation, and it becomes
very difficult to state that this is due to instinct. This would only
enable the creature to do everything in accordance with instinct; but
it actually adjusts itself to the external circumstances. That is the
important point.
Here, in our
country, it does not frequently happen, but the further one goes south
the greater nuisance do the ants become. Imagine a house, and in one
corner of it, without the owner having noticed anything, the ants
have gathered; they have carried in all sorts of things, particles of
earth, minute fragments of wood, and in some corner that has been
overlooked in cleaning, have made a small dwelling place which no one
notices. From here they make passages into the kitchen, into the
pantry, following the most complicated ways, and bring back all they
require for food or other purposes, from the kitchen or pantry. This
can happen in southern countries, and the house may be quite pervaded
by a colony of ants without anyone living there knowing they are mere
fellow inhabitants of the ants, until they discover by chance, or by
sight, that something in the store cupboard has been nibbled, and the
real source only comes to light when the passages are traced. Here
again, one cannot get very far by speaking of mere instinct, for you
would then have to say that Nature has given these creatures an
instinct to take up their abode precisely in this very house; what
they build there must be so constructed that it is adapted to this
particular house.
But you see,
these creatures do not work out of mere instinct; there is wisdom in
what they do. If you test some individual ant, you would certainly not
arrive at the conclusion that it was especially wise, for what it
does when separated from the colony, or what it may be forced to do,
does not reveal any special wisdom. One then begins to realise that
it is not the individual ant that can reason, but the entire colony
of ants as a unity; the colony of bees, for example, is wise in this
sense. The separate ants of the colony have no individual
intelligence, and for this reason the work is carried on by the whole
colony in an extremely interesting way. There are, moreover, many
other more interesting happenings within these ant-hills. There
is, for instance, a kind of ant which does as follows: somewhere or
other it builds on the ground a kind of wall (drawing on the board);
here it is raised; here, it forms a circle on the surrounding earth,
there, digs a hole. Within are the ants. Sometimes the hole is at the
top, like the crater of a volcano; within are the many passages with
their outlets.
Now these ants
do something very peculiar. They destroy all the grasses and plants which
grow round about, with the exception of one particular kind of grass. All
other grasses are destroyed, even at times, all other plants. Thus,
in the centre we have a kind of hillock, and all round it looks as
though the ground had been very finely paved. Through the ants biting
away everything, the soil has become very compact, and is very firm.
There is the ant-hill, and all round it a smooth pavement, almost
like asphalt, but rather lighter in colour.
The ants then
search all round about and collect a certain kind of grass which they then
begin to cultivate. As soon as the wind brings other seeds, they bite off
the new plants the moment they begin to grow; they will not have them
in the place they have made so smooth, and in all the surrounding
area nothing else is permitted to grow but just this one special kind
of grass. The ants have established a little property of their own,
as it were, and regularly cultivate the kind of grass that best suits
them; nothing else is allowed to grow there; all other plants are
bitten away. The grass which is allowed to grow becomes quite
different in character from the same grass where it grows further
away, where, for instance, it is growing in loose soil. In the
hardened soil made by the ants, the cultivated grass has quite hard
seeds, as hard as stone. One can find these ant-hills. Round about
them there is a regular little farm, 'and the ants are engaged in
agriculture. Darwin, who especially observed these things, calls it
so. One finds in the soil very hard seeds somewhat like small grains
of maize, and when all is ready, the ants come out, bite off the
tops, and carry them into their dwelling. For a while they stay
inside; one does not see them, but they are very busy inside there.
Whatever they have no use for, like the little stalks that were still
attached to the hard seeds, they bite off, and after a time they come
out again and run all about, and throw away all they do not want,
keeping in their ant-hill only the hard silica-like seeds. These they
partly use as food, biting them with their very hard teeth, or they
use them for their building. Everything they cannot make use of they
throw out. After all, we men do very much the same. These farming
ants manage to provide themselves with all they need in a very fine
way!
One has really
to ask oneself: what is actually happening here? Actually, an entirely
new kind of grass is brought into existence. These silica-hard seeds
cannot be found anywhere else. They are only produced by the ants,
and the ants work further upon them. What then is really happening
here?
Before
considering this, we will approach the question from another side.
Let us go back to the wasps, among which I told you, we find creatures
that deposit their eggs on the leaves, and in the bark of trees;
gall-nuts are then formed out of which the young wasps emerge. But
quite other things can also happen. There are certain caterpillars
which look like this (drawing on the blackboard). You all know them;
these caterpillars are covered with woolly hairs, with quite prickly-woolly
hairs. The following can happen to these caterpillars. One or more wasps of
a special kind simply insert their eggs into the caterpillar, and when
the eggs mature the grubs creep out of them. Bees, and other insects
of this kind, all make their first appearance as grubs, also the
ants. You know how, when one clears away an ant-heap, one finds the
white, so-called ants' eggs, which are given to caged birds. They are
however, not eggs, but the larvae that have crept out of the eggs. It
is not correct to call them eggs.
Now when the
wasp lays its eggs into the caterpillar, it is really very remarkable. As
I have already told you, these grubs when they first emerge are very hungry,
and there are a great number of them in the caterpillar. It is really
remarkable, for if one of these grubs were to begin to eat the
caterpillar's stomach, the whole affair of the wasp's development
would come to an end, for the caterpillar could not live if any
organ, an eye, or to do with the heart or with the digestion, were
eaten into. The thing would then come to an end. But these minute
wasp grubs show their intelligence by not biting into, or feeding
upon any vital organ, but by eating only those organs which can be
injured for quite a long time. The caterpillar does not die, it is
ill; but the wasp grubs can still go on devouring it. It is most
wisely arranged that the wasp grubs do not bite into anything that
would fatally injure the caterpillar. Possibly, you may have seen how
these larvæ emerge from inside the caterpillar when they are
mature? The caterpillar has been their foster-mother, nourishing the
whole brood with her own body. Now they creep out, develop further,
and seek their food from the plants. When they are fully developed,
the eggs are once more deposited in a similar caterpillar,
You might well
say that there is something extremely clever in all this, and indeed,
as I have already said, the more one observes such things, the more do
they arouse one's deepest admiration. It cannot be otherwise; wonder
is kindled, and one asks oneself the meaning of such things.
If one would
discover their meaning, one must first say; we have the plants growing out
of the earth; we have the caterpillars. Then these insects appear, and
eat their fill from the flowers, and caterpillars, and then reproduce
themselves. So it goes on, over and over again. To us men it seems as
though the whole insect world might just as well not exist at all.
Naturally, as human beings, when we see the bee, we say; the bees
give us honey, therefore bee-keeping is of use to us. Very good; but
this is from the point of view of man. If the bees are robbers, and
merely take away the nectar from the flowers, and we men then use the
honey for our food, or as a remedy, then this is all to our
advantage. But from the point of view of the flowers, it looks
like a mere robbery in which we, as men, take part. The question
therefore, is whether from the point of view of the flowers they
would say, as it were; out there are those robbers, the bees, wasps
and ants who rob us of our saps; we should thrive much better if they
did not take away our saps.
You see,
gentlemen, this is a point of view that a man usually takes as regards
the flowers. But it is not so; it is absolutely not so. The matter is
entirely different. When one is looking at some flower, and an insect,
let us say a bee, is sucking the juices of the flower, or from the willow
blossom, one must say to oneself: how would it be for the plant
if the bee, or the wasp or some other insect, did not come to suck
out this nectar? Now would it be then?
This is naturally
a question far more difficult to answer than that of a mere robbery,
for one must look deeply into the whole household of Nature. It is
not possible to reach the right conclusion unless one is able
to look back into the earlier stages of the earth's evolution. You
see, the earth was not always the same as it is today. If the earth
had always been as it is today, when we find the dead lime-stone, the
dead quartz or gneiss, or mica-schist, and so on; when we find
growing out of the present-day seeds, the plants, when we find the
animals. If the earth had always been like this, the whole of what we
see today could not exist, could not be there at all! Those who begin
their science only at the point of what exists today, give themselves
up to complete illusion.
He who would
seek all the mysteries, all the laws of the earth in that alone wherein
modern science seeks them, is as if a dweller in Mars should come down
to the earth, who had no idea of living men, who only went to a mortuary
and saw there the dead men. The dead could not be there at all if
they had not first been living men. The inhabitant of Mars who had
never seen living men, and saw only the dead, would first have to be
guided to living men; then he would be able to say —
“Yes, now I understand why the dead have these forms;
before I did not understand this, because I did not know the
living form that preceded the dead one.” Thus, one must go back
to earlier conditions if one would know the laws of the earth
evolution. The earth had long ago a very different form; I have
spoken of it as the Moon-condition, and in my book, “An Outline
of Occult Science,” it is also called the Moon-condition,
because the present Moon is a remnant of this ancient earth. Other
stages of evolution in their turn preceded this one of the Moon. The
earth has transformed itself; it was originally altogether
different.
Now the earth
was once at such a stage that plants and insects such as we have today, did
not exist at all. The matter, gentlemen, was thus; there was, let us say,
something that can be compared with the earth of today. Out of this
grew plant-like forms, but plant-like forms that were continually
changing, that continually assumed different forms, as the clouds do,
for instance. There were then such clouds in the environment of the
earth, but they were not clouds like the clouds we see today, which
are dead, or at least seem to be dead; they were living clouds, as
living as the flowers of today. If you can imagine to yourselves that
our clouds could become alive and turn a greenish colour, then you
would have a picture of the plant kingdom of that time.
The scientific
gentlemen of today have very strange ideas on such matters. There was
recently a most ludicrous article in the newspaper. Once more a new
scientific discovery had been made, quite in the modern way. It was really
absurd! It was stated that if prepared in a certain way, milk was a
good remedy for scurvy, a very ugly disease. Well, gentlemen, what
does the scientist of today do? I have already referred to this. He
analyses the milk. Then he finds that milk contains such and such
chemical components. But I have also told you that one can feed mice
with the chemical substances in the milk, but if one gives them these
only, the mice die within a few days. Bunge's pupils confirmed this,
(see previously mentioned article in the
“Schweizerische Bienenzeitung”) and merely
said; “Well, yes, there is a life-substance in the milk, as
also in honey, Vitamin.” You remember, as I said before, one
might just as well say “poverty comes from being poor,”
as say what is said here, “there is Vitamin in it.”
Well gentlemen,
an important discovery has been made, there are various substances in
milk, that have very complicated names and milk when prepared in a
special way, is a remedy for scurvy. Then in a truly learned way
investigations were made to see whether the scurvy could be cured if
one gave the scurvy patients only all the things with the learned
names that were contained in the milk. They were not in the
least cured by any of the component substances. But when all of these
were present (in the specially prepared milk) then the scurvy was
cured. No single component by itself cured, only the whole together.
Well says the scientist to himself; what remains over when one
subtracts all the components? What then remains over? For now he
eliminates them all. He does not admit that these components have an
etheric body, he reckons them all out, and what remains?
The
“Vitamin!” The vitamin which must be what cures
the scurvy is not to be found among the component parts. Where then
is it? So now they make this fine tale — it must be in the
water of the milk! Therefore, the remedy for scurvy is the water!
This is really absurd, but it is a learned affair today. For if water
is to contain vitamin, then with our learning we should arrive up
there in the clouds. We should have to look around us and say:
“Water is everywhere and vitamin is in the water.” But
then we would be at the stage at which the earth once was. Only
today, it is no longer so. Plant-life was there, a living plant
covering, and this living covering of plants was fertilised from all
directions from the environment. There were then no separate animals,
no wasps for instance, but from the surrounding regions there
came a substance which had an animal-like nature. Our earth was once
in a condition of which one could say that it was surrounded by
clouds that had plant-life within them; from the periphery, other
clouds approached and fertilised them; these clouds had an animal
nature. From cosmic spaces came the animal nature; from the earth the
essence of plant-being rose upwards.
All this has
changed. The plants have become our clearly outlined flowers which grow out
of the earth, no longer forming great clouds. But within the plants there
remains a longing to receive an influence from without. Here we have
a rose growing out of the earth; here a rose petal, here another,
then a third and so on. Now comes a wasp. This wasp immediately bites
a piece out of the rose petal, carries it off to its nest, and uses
it for building, or gives it as food to its young. A piece of the
rose petal is simply bitten out by the wasp, and carried there, Well,
as I said before, our rose bushes are no longer clouds: they have
become sharply defined things. But what once lived within them, what
was once united with all that entered in as the essence of animal
life, this has remained behind within the rose leaves and blossoms.
It is there within them. In every rose leaf is something which must
of necessity be in some way fertilised from without, from the whole
environment.
You see,
gentlemen, what the flowers need, what they actually need, is a substance
that also plays an important part in the human body. When you study the
human body the most diverse substances are found in it. But everywhere
within the human body these substances are transformed into something
which, in certain quantities, is always present within the human body
which has need of it. This substance is formic acid.
If you go to
an ant-hillock, and collect some ants and squeeze them, you get a juice.
This juice contains formic acid and a little alcohol. It is inside
the ants. But this juice is also very finely distributed over your
body. Whatever you eat during your life time is always transformed
into formic acid, not of course, exclusively, for there are other
substances also, but in small quantities. This formic acid permeates
your whole body. When you are ill, and have not sufficient formic
acid within you, it is a serious matter for your body, for it then
has a tendency, just because you have not enough formic acid within
you, (and here I come once more to Herr Müller's question, in
answer to it) your body has a tendency to become gouty, or rheumatic.
It develops too much uric acid, and too little formic acid. The ants
also have in their bodies this substance that the human body needs.
This formic acid, gentlemen, is indeed something that is made use of
throughout nature, You actually cannot find any bark of any tree that
does not contain some formic acid. Formic acid is everywhere in the
tree, just as it is in the human body. In every leaf, everywhere
there must be formic acid.
But not only
formic acid must be there, but also what is closely akin to it, and later
becomes the bee poison. All these insects contain a certain substance
within them which is poisonous. If one is stung by a bee, one gets
inflammation; if one is stung by a wasp, it is sometimes even worse.
This business of wasp stings can be pretty bad. Brehm describes how
these insects can play bad tricks on men and animals.
It happened that
a young cow-herd had taken a large number of cows out to graze, and the
pasture was full of wasp nests. The cow-herd's dog ran about;
suddenly the cow-herd's dog goes mad, rushes round like a mad dog,
and no one knows what has happened. As fast into it can the dog
rushes to a neighbouring stream, flings itself into the water, and
shakes and shakes itself. The lad was much disturbed by this, and
goes to the rescue of the dog. He does not jump into the water, but
tries to help it from the bank. Most unluckily he steps on a nest, as
the dog had probably done before, and the wasps sting him too, and he
begins to rush about like a madman, and finally jumps into the water.
And now, because the dog has vanished, and the cow-herd has vanished,
confusion arises in the herd of cows. The cows which tread on nests
also get stung, and behave as though mad. Finally, most of the herd
are in the stream also — as if they were all mad.
You see, insect
stings can do one a very bad turn. All these creatures have poisons in
them; even an ant stings one, and causes a little inflammation because
it injects some formic acid into the wound. This formic acid, moreover,
is present in all living things in a right dilution. If there were no
ants, bees and wasps, which are the preparers of these poisons, what
would happen?
Truly, gentleman,
the same thing would happen that would also come to pass in the propagation
of the human race if all the men were beheaded, and only women were left
on the earth. Humanity could not then continue to exist, for the male
semen would no longer be there. Well, these creatures all have the
semen in addition, but they none-the-less need what comes from these
poisons for their existence, for these poisons have remained over
from what was once in the whole environment. In the finest state of
dilution, bee poison, wasp poison, ant poison, once descended upon
the plants from cosmic spaces, and the remnants are still present
today. So when you see a bee sitting on some willow-tree or on some
flower, you must not say: the insect only wants to rob the flower of
something; rather must you say: when the little bee sits there and
sucks, the flower is so content that it lets its sap flow to the spot
where the bee sucks. While the bee is taking something from the
flower, bee or wasp poison flows from the bee to the flower. From the
wasp, the wasp poison flows, and more especially when the ant attacks
the tree stump which no longer has life, formic acid flows in. If the
ant visits a flower, then the sap of the flower unites with the
formic acid. This is necessary.
If these things
did not happen, if bees, wasps and ants did not exist and continually
attack the plants and bite into them, then the necessary formic acid,
the necessary poisons, would not flow into the flowers, and the plants
would in time die out.
You see,
substances such as are usually called life-substances, are highly valued
by man; yet it is precisely only these substances that are truly
life-substances. If one has deadly nightshade, within it is a poison,
a very powerful one. But what is the deadly nightshade? It collects
spirituality from the world's environment. Poisons are gatherers of
what is spiritual; for this reason they are healing remedies. Fundamentally
speaking, the flowers sicken through the life-substances, and the little
bees, and wasps and ants, work continually as small physicians
bringing to the flowers the formic acid they need, and at the
same moment, healing their sickness. Thus all is once more
healed.
The bees, wasps
and ants are not mere robbers, for in the same moment they bring life to the
plants.
It is even the
same with the caterpillars which would also die out, and none would remain
after a time. You will probably say no great harm would be done if
all the caterpillars were to disappear; but in their turn the
birds feed on them. Throughout the whole of Nature there are these
inner relationships. When we see, for example, how the ants permeate
everything with their formic acid, we look into the whole
household of Nature and its splendour. Everywhere things happen that
are essential for the maintenance of life, and of the world.
You see, here
is a tree, and the tree has bark. The bark decays when I cut down the
tree; then it moulders. People say: “Well, let it rot
away.” Just try to imagine all that moulders away in the
forests, fallen leaves and so on, within the course of the year! Men
are willing to let it all rot away, but Nature orders it
otherwise. Everywhere there are ant-heaps, and from these
ant-heaps formic acid enters into the soil of the forest. When you
have both forest soil and an ant-heap, it is the same as if you take
a glass of water and add a drop of something else to it; the whole
contents are at once affected. If you put in salt, all the water is
at once made salty. If you have an ant-heap then the formic acid goes
in the same moment into the forest soil, and all the soil which is
already decaying is saturated with this formic acid.
It is not only
into the inner parts of the living plants, and into the still living
caterpillars that formic acid penetrates when the bee sits on the
flower, and the flower absorbs what it receives from the bee. All
these things can only be learned by means of spiritual science; the
other kind of science is only concerned with what the bee takes away
from the flowers. But the bees would never have been able to sit for
thousands of years on the flowers had they not fostered them in the
act of biting into them.
So it is also
with the lifeless substances of the woods. Even physical science as it
is today, concludes that the earth will one day be quite dead. It would
indeed be so, for a state of things would eventually come about when
decay would prevail, when the earth would be dead. That this will not
be so, is because wherever the earth decays it is in the same moment
penetrated by all that is yielded up by the bees, wasps and ants. The
bees, it is true, give it only to the living flowers, the wasps for
the most part also to the living plants. But the ants give what they
hand over in the formic acid directly to what is mouldering and dead;
in a certain degree they rouse it to life, in this way doing their
part that the earth in its decaying substances shall still retain
life. Well may one say that wonder is awakened at the activity of the
spirit in all things, but when one can approach it more nearly, then
one realises it has immense significance.
Let us look once
more at those farming ants which cultivate their little field, and change
the character of the plants they grow there. Truly, gentlemen, a man
could not nourish himself with what grows there, for if a man were to
eat those little rice grains that are as hard as silica, he would
first get strange illnesses because he would have too much formic
acid inside him, and in addition to this, so injure his teeth that
for a time the dentists would be kept busy. At last, he would die
wretchedly, because of these silica-hard rice-grains which had been
thus developed.
But the ant-heap
would say: when we ants go out into nature and suck that out of the plants
which is everywhere there, then we get far too little formic acid, and
can give far too little formic acid to the earth. Let us therefore,
select the plants which we can cultivate so that they get quite hard,
stony hard, and then we can get plenty of formic acid from this
hardness. So these farming ants do this that they may get the
greatest possible amount of formic acid. It is these ants again that
give back so much formic acid to the earth. That is the connection.
From this you can see that poisons when they cause inflammation, or
the like, are also perpetual remedies for the holding back of the
processes of death. One can say, it is precisely the bee that is of
great importance in this regard, that all may be preserved within the
flowers; there is a great affinity between the bees and the
flowers.
This preservation
actually shows that every time the insects are developing their activities
on the earth, the earth is, as it were, quickened by their poison. This
is the spiritual relationship. If anyone asks what are the spiritual
relationships, I never like merely to say they are so and so; I give
the facts, and from the facts you can judge for yourselves whether
they have significance or no. The facts are such that one sees
significance everywhere. But the people who call themselves
scientists today, do not tell one so. In life this has certain
effects. In our country this is perhaps less taken into account, but
when you go further south, the simple folk, the peasants, will often
say out of a kind of instinctive knowledge; one must not
destroy these ant-heaps, for they prevent the mould from becoming
harmful. Those who are still wiser, will say something quite
different if you walk with them through the forest, and especially
where trees have been cut down and young trees are growing up. Then
these people who are wise in their noses, not in their top-story (one
can be wise also in one's nose) when these people go where the trees
have been felled and young trees are being cared for, they will say:
“Here, it will all go well; it does not smell so mouldy as it
often does; there must be an ant-heap near, and it is proving its
usefulness.” These people smell this; they are clever with
their noses. Much homely and useful knowledge is derived from a
clever nose! Unfortunately, modern civilisation only regards
the cultivation of the brain, and rejects all that is instinctive;
instinct has become merely a word.
Creatures like
the bees know all this collectively, as a colony, as an ant-heap; it comes
about by a kind of sense of smell. As I said before, much that is
instinctive knowledge may come from a cleverness of the nose.
Well, gentlemen,
we shall continue the subject next week Today, I wished to say that the
bees, wasps and ants do not only rob Nature, but help to make it possible
for Nature to live and thrive.
|