Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/401/en

The diaphragm organ of the soil seems, measured against the dimensions of the heights extending above it and the depths concealing themselves from view below, to be sheer nothingness. And yet it is everything! From it springs the higher plant nature that forms the foundation of life for the existence of animal and man on earth. It is the root of the plant that strives vertically downward in the direction of the earth's centre, and it is the shoot that strives vertically upward toward the sun from the vegetative point of the seedling in rhythmic leaf sequence — and, encompassed by the metabolic activity in light, air and warmth, prepares in blossom, fruit and seed formation the foodstuffs for animal and man in living composition. In the flowering plant and the tree-nature, the agricultural individuality creates for itself, in a nature-way and graspable only in spirit, an image. The spiritual staff that supersensibly connects the depths of the earth with the heights of the sun, that unites in threefold disposition the forces of heaviness and lightness into verticality, embodies itself imagewise each year in the sprouting and shooting of the plants.